These pads are incredible! With relatively little physical effort, I was able to polish the frets on my guitar to a mirror-like finish! The foam is flexible enough to allow the pad to conform to the contours of the surface being polished and yet rigid enough to aid in distributing the pressure applied to the pad over a larger area. What the soft foam backing also does is virtually eliminate fingertip soreness. Unlike through sandpaper or non-foam-backed Micro-Mesh sheets, the hardness and/or angular nature of the surface cannot be felt through these pads, so all the negative effects caused thereby are done away with too. Of course, the pads cannot conform to sharp angles, unless you do not mind creasing them. After a long polishing session, the foam compresses and thus loses some of its rigidity, but once the pads are washed and dried, it seems to return to its original state. Unfortunately, the creases caused by bending the pads sharply remain in the surface material (not in the foam itself). Although this does not decrease the polishing effectiveness by any significant degree, those creases are the weakest points of the pads at which they are going to bend under pressure, so that is something to keep in mind. Last but not least, I was surprised by how durable the surface material is! When I was polishing the ends of the frets (which were relatively sharp on my guitar), I was certain the material would rip, but I was morally prepared to sacrifice a set of these pads to make my guitar playable. To my astonishment, the material survived without a scratch! I can see them being used to restore silverware, to polish out the scratches on a bracelet and/or crystal of a watch, to give a fountain pen a new life, and so on. These pads, particularly those with the finer grits, remove very little material per stroke, so the risk of removing too much is really low.
