I purchased a 3 pack of the new Microplane sanding discs. I have used them on a couple of occasions, here’s my impressions.

If you don’t want to read any further, I’ll give you the short review. Save your money, while this may be a great idea in the lab it doesn’t deliver in the shop.First the good. The manufacturing on this product is impressive, each disc perfectly perforated and backed with a heavy felt-like backing which gives the disc a lot more rigidity than the stainless alone. They come in coarse, medium, and fine grades and this roughly maps to a 60-200 grit spectrum. It’s pretty easy to tell what the grades are, the finer you go the more perforations and the smaller they are. They are advertised to cut faster than sandpaper, something I would agree with to a limit. The course disc did indeed cut faster, while the medium and fine did initially but then tapered out. I think what happens with the fine discs is that the edge on each perforation gets flattened out pretty quickly. There is little dust with these discs, the best way I can describe what they produce is micro-shavings. I guess it’s the shearing action (everything lately is about “shearing”, apparently). The bad thing about this product is that it doesn’t work as well as they advertise, more importantly, I found the medium and fine discs left a pitted finish in maple, poplar, and oak (the woods I tried them on). The only way I can describe the finish they left is by saying it looked like someone took a toothed wheel and ran it back and forth over the wood. The marks are small, but I could see them and I wouldn’t put a finish over the surface as it was. Sandpaper is pretty forgiving on edges, rounding over slightly. The microplane discs are not, they beat up edges if you go over the edge and leave a result that is similar to what happens when you take a poorly tuned card scraper over an edge – fuzzy. I tried the microplane discs with different amounts of pressure and dialed down the speed on my ROS, nothing change resulted in a better finish. I threw out the fine and medium discs and kept the coarse, which does cut a lot faster than sandpaper and because it’s coarse I am not concerned about the finish it leaves.