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Easy Fix for Scratched CDs
NotQuiteOnto writes "Ben Hayes (om3ga) has performed an experiment as to the best method to fix scratched CDs. He set himself the criteria that it can't take longer that 5 minutes and it has to be something in his house. The result isn't what you'd think ..." Luckily, he stopped before "peanut butter."
It was semi-diluted hair gel in a thin coat on the disk..
That said, how is this any better than the scratched disk in the first place? Sure it might play once, but now you have bloody hair gel on your disk! that's even stickier and more fragile than the cheap plastic they used to make the disk.
I like my solution better:
download what was on the disk from somewhere else.
Q: isn't that piracy?
A: Does it really matter? they sold it to you on crappy cheap plastic.. it should be fair use to "repress" the cd/dvd you bought.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
In shop class we used to use car wax, armorall, craft glue mixed with rubbing alcohol or mineral oils to finish & polish cut ends of plastic, glass and polyethelene tubing. Any application here?
When I was fishing a few eeks ago, I accidently sprayed DEET (mosquito repellent contained in Deep-Woods Off) on one of my glasses' lens, which is plastic. I immediately dunked it in the lake and put them back on. I thought I had lost a lense but then I saw that the DEET had removed all the scratches on that lens. I haven't tried it on the other lens yet, but I will certainly give it a shot once I have my new glasses. I'm thinking of trying it on my scratched CDs, too.
Wax? Pledge? Toothpaste? Buffing?
Y'all are a bunch of workaholics.
Just lightly wave a propane or butane torch over the scratches.
It works for all polycarbonates, including CDs, DVDs, helmet visors, motorcycle windshields, airplane windshields, cellphone screens.
The trick is to wave the flame over it so very very lightly and quickly, that the rough edges of the scratch briefly melt and flow.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I've also tried various filling-in materials: chapstick, polishing wax, etc. They all seem to work as long as you can get the excess off cleanly. But I'm not certian if they work for the reason we like to think. One experiment left the scratch very visible, but the CD still working better. That got me wondering. So I tried filling with a positively opaque crayon (wiping away excess), and that worked too. I figured it could be done even quicker if I could skip the cleaning up, so I tried with a black fine-line felt marker, simly drawing a thin line on top of the scratch, and guess what: it not only worked fine, it could handle much larger defects than nothig else had been able to fix (well, actually there was a barely audible artifact, but aleast it played).
It has to be sad: this was on music CDs, so you can lose quite a lot of bits without serious harm to the result (and even a slightly audible tick is something you can live with), so it's not a fir comparison to software. But it did make me wonder: do all those remedies really help the machine read more bits correctly by repairing the refrective plane, as it is tempting to believe? Or do they simply allow the built in error correction do its job, by blocking the area where the (clear but warped) surface of the sratch would otherwise make the laser lose its tracking?
sudo ergo sum
I thought only lpd could catch fire...
(yes I know it's an old and obscure reference and it probably has been removed by now. Puzzled me to no end the first time I saw it though)
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Given the speed at which the drives rotate the discs, that's what I've been wondering with all those solutions involving fluids. There's bound to be droplets that fly away from the disk into the drive enclosure.
Now depending on the location of the circuitry and the frequency of the use of "home repaired disks" this may or may not be an issue, but it certainly would make me a bit nervous...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Perhaps for CDs there is a similar phenomenon. I am not sure how the error correction in a CD works, I am not sure whether it has the problem of "identifying" errors - I thought it simply applied to the data stream a standard decoding transform based on distance to a correct codeword. So perhaps part of the benefit of painting the defect black is that it cuts down on reflections, so that you can read neighbouring areas of the CD better?
EAC will tell you exactly where it has trouble reading sectors & you can set how many times it'll retry.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
A problem that I see much more often than scratched plastic is scratched foil. :(
I wonder to myself---why isn't the top layer of the CD coated with another layer of plastic?
The foil is pretty much exposed to any particles... a thin layer of paint isn't going to do much.
The CD cases (the big book-like things, not jewel cases) always seem to accumulate little particles in the sleeves, which will rub against the foil, and scratch it, or worse, make it start coming off. This happens especially with cheap CDRs (also, exposing CDRs to heat tends to make the foil start cracking). I don't understand why the data layer isn't well-protected on BOTH SIDES.
I guess the solution to things rubbing against the disc would be to use only jewel cases, as they suspend the disc in air so that particles wouldn't be forced up against it, but, I can't carry around huge crates filled with jewel cases everywhere I go.
Perhaps the best solution is to keep original CDs in jewel cases, never use cheap CDRs, and only carry around copies of CDs/CDRs in the big CD books, and keep a portable air-can or hand-held vacuum handy to suck dirt out of the case every time it's opened/closed, and never leave it open (just open it to take something in/out, then immediately close it), and never put anything heavy on top of the case (it could press particles that are in the case into the foil).
Is there a better option? I've lost so many things this way... Are there CDR manufacturers that put extra layers of paint or a thin layer of plastic on the top of the CDR? I seem to recall some audio CDs I own having a layer of plastic overtop of the foil (especially older ones), but most don't seem to.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Pretty much any type of oil or grease will dissolve latex. That's why most "personal lubricants" are water-based.
Interestingly, I work at a restaurant, and one of the banes I deal with his having to constantly change gloves, not for want of sanitation (which I do heed, btw), but because the pulled-pork (it's a southern thing *shrugs*) grease will eat the glove quickly. However, one night, I accidentally dropped a glove in the deep-fryer and nothing happened to it at all. No melting, no warping, etc, and the grease is vegetable-based.