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Comment on Some of you are too young to know what this is

I had one of those, it was a CD scratch remover / cleaner. It actually worked somewhat - you could restore some discs that were too scratched to use.

It was basically a leather (maybe) band wrapped around the spiral wheel that buffed the CD in a radial motion (center to outer) at the same time that the disc would slowly rotate around a spindle. You’d end up with radial buff-marks all the way around the CD, which looked a little bit similar to the pattern of the blue spiral thing in the center, coincidentally.

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Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Never seen one like that. The video store I worked at had one that was huge and looked like an alien ware PC. You put the disc in and after a deafening horrendous noise for what felt like a full 60s or more you’d pull out an astonishingly well cleaned near scratch free disc. I didn’t actually put 2 and 3 together that the DVD cleaner was of course buffing and so inherently destructive and I thought it was kinda neat so for a little while there I started buffing discs with only superficial damage that hadn’t had complaints 😳.

The awful noise it used to make got worse and worse over the lifetime of the machine too. Crazy thing. Did it’s job really well though.

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mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Yeah. I had an automatic version. It was basically a pair of ultra-fine sandpaper wheels, and some buffing wheels for a finishing pass. The wheels would spin while the disc slowly rotated, using the ultra-fine sandpaper to remove the surface layer of plastic (where the scratches were) and then the buffing pads would smooth things over a little bit so the surface was smoother.

It definitely still left circular buff marks all over the surface of the disc. But it at least helped get rid of the random scratches that would cause discs to fail to read.

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