What do you do when you pop an old CD or a DVD into the player and stare at fancy messages that essentially let you know your disc is bloody scratched?
Most people I know stare longingly at it for a while and then throw it away. I usually pull the offending disc out and use it as a coaster. But there are some blokes, like I discovered today, who will do anything to get it back to work. This is the story of one such bloke. Exasperated with damaged discs, he did some reading on how the thing is built. He finally figured that discs can be repaired if the scratches inflicted on its surface are filled with some substance. What it was, he wouldn’t know until he played around with a few options. To make things a little more difficult for himself, he set himself two conditions.
One, whatever method he hit upon, it ought to be executable in five minutes. Two, whatever it is that he eventually used, it ought to be commonly found at anybody’s home. Armed with these variables, he started experimenting.
The first thing he did was to burn music on five discs and scratch them with a scissor. Having done that, he took the first disc, poured water over it, and rubbed the disc gently with a piece of lint-free cloth to make sure the water embedded itself into the scratches. Didn’t work!
On the next attempt, he took a bottle of deodorant and sprayed it over the disc. The idea was simple. Deo contains isopropyl myristate dissolved in alcohol.
He was hoping that when the alcohol evaporated, the isopropyl myristate would find itself into the cracks. A cursory look at the disc two minutes later indicated it may work. It didn’t, again!
He looked around a bit and stumbled on lem-oil. This is something musicians use to protect wood surfaces on their instruments. It preserves the wood and tones down scratches and blemishes. After spraying the oil on the CD, he rubbed it vigorously with the lint-free cloth. Apparently, when he popped the CD into the player, it worked.
But the music didn’t sound right. In any case, lem-oil isn’t volatile enough to evaporate in five minutes. He dropped the idea and picked up toothpaste.
Now, the toothpaste method is something quite a few people have tried. It is a mild abrasive. So you take the tiniest bit of paste on the tip of your finger.
Without touching the CD itself with the finger, apply the toothpaste only around the scratched parts. Now put the CD under a thin stream of running water and tilt the CD. This way, the excess paste runs off and what remains gets into the CD. Apparently, his player spat the CD out.
A few other things later, he finally hit upon hair gel. Applied in much the same way toothpaste is, he followed up by rubbing it in and ran a thin stream of water on to loosen it up. This way, the excess gel was washed off. And the disc worked—perfectly.
http://infotech.indiatimes.com/Personal_Tech/Digital_Home/Saving_that_disk/articleshow/1979759.cms
