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If you’re like me, your CDs get pretty scratched up. With or without a jewel box, with or without a plastic sleeve, invariably they develop nicks and cuts as my son will decide to scrape one around on the wood floor for fun, or I’ll just mishandle it while in the car, or, or, or… There are myriad ways in which these soon-to-be obsolete discs get ruined, causing us to curse and throw the things in the trash, or just catalog them back in a CD booklet hoping one day in the future some miracle chemical cure-all will be invented to unscratch ‘em.
Whelp, the future is here, only the cure-all isn’t a toxic chemical, but rather, a banana! Check out the later half of the Howcast.com video below to learn how to resurface them, or just see the list.
1. Peel the banana
2. Rub the banana on the CD in a circular motion
3. Use the underside of the peel and rub the banana in deeper
4. Wipe away the residue with a lint-free cloth, like you’d use to clean your car windows
5. Using another cloth, remove smudges with a spritz of Windex
6. Voila, she is like new!
Apparently the maker of the video has never baked before in his life; he’s holding up a can of baking powder as he talks about baking soda. I’m not sure if the difference matters much in the CD-cleaning realm, but you probably don’t want to mix those up in the kitchen.
posted by Cat on 7-1-2008 at 8:46 am
Does this really work? I feel like scatching a CD just to find out!
posted by GTT on 7-1-2008 at 11:02 am
Wow, I had no idea! Another idea, in case you don’t have a banana or don’t want to waste it: just rub some rubbing alcohol on the CD and it fixes it right up. It doesn’t work on super-deep scratches, but it does help a lot. (Works for DVDs too).
posted by AMT on 7-1-2008 at 12:06 pm
Brasso is actually the best stuff for CD and DVD fixing. It basically just makes the opaque scratches translucent. I’ve seen tests done which show that it rivals commercial CD repair kits (and bananas), at least in the area of “fixing scratched CDs and DVDs”.
search on “burning issues”, “brasso”, and, “cd repair” to get to the study.
Bananas and or toothpaste certainly win in the “smells nice, but doesn’t cause brain damage” category.
posted by Noah Kleiman on 7-1-2008 at 12:22 pm
Hey phantom Cat! Narking on my handle! =P Anyway, does anyone know if that banana thing actually works?
reCaptcha: maturity fever
posted by Cat on 7-1-2008 at 2:41 pm
This method might work for video discs but it won’t for data discs. The banana probably smears the gouge so that the sudden variation in light refraction doesn’t send the laser skipping off to the wrong track when it hits the flaw. If the laser skips the track it can result in repeated stutter or lockup on playback.
For data discs you need to be able to recover all of the data. (Losing just one bit can prevent a game or software load).
DVDs have built-in CRC32 redundancy, which will correct minor errors but not big gouges or circular scratches.
GameDr is the most reliable method I know of to repair discs. It is a fine-grain sander/buffer that literally rubs off a layer of plastic, leaving a smooth surface. The aluminum data layer is just under the printed side so it can scrape quite a bit plastic off the bottom and still give you a readable disc. It costs $25-35.
posted by Gideon7 on 7-1-2008 at 2:59 pm