As the title says why does toothpaste fix disks
In: 2049
Toothpaste is just slightly rough in texture, which means when you rub it on a disk, it smoothes out any light scratches. Once the scratches are buffed out, the disk should in theory be playable again as it is now a smooth surface again.
Toothpaste has a fine grit. Rubbing it on a disk lightly removes the fine scratches. That fixes the surface, the disk plays better.
I think an important piece of knowledge, if you didn’t know it, is the the information on a disk is located *inside* the plastic surface. The plastic serves to protect that surface and make the disc rigid, but it’s not like a record where the outermost surface has the important information on it.
So the rubbing with tooth paste polishes down the scratch the screwed up the laser’s ability to travel through the plastic and read the information hidden inside. It’s not like it’s abrading away the information itself.
It never worked for me, I can’t bring myself to believe any of these explanations unless I was doing it wrong as a kid haha
Dont use toothpaste … use regular cutting compound. toothpaste is abrasive, but you dont know how much, nor if it is equally distributed in size.
A cutting compound with an orbital polishing machine can help getting the disks back to working condition. Beware though, if the mirror side of the disk is damaged, the disk is lost.
Polishing a CD or DVD is a very delicate operation in any case. Without the appropriate hardware and method, you will kill the disk.
I remember my friend had a scratched GTA disk for PS2 which hadn’t worked for months, I told him to wait and got toothpaste because I’d heard that worked and it actually did, coolest thing ever and he was surprised
Toothpaste is a very light abrasive, it can “sand off” scratches.
Protip – a scrub with toothpaste will often take out water rings from wooden furniture.
Toothpaste, among other things, is abrasive. Not by much, but just enough to help dislodge dirt, Polish and smooth a surface.
Disks store their info below the plastic layer that tends to get scratched over time. That plastic is just there to protect what’s beneath while still enabling the laser to pass through and read the data.
You can use the toothpaste on the disks in the same way you would use very fine grade sandpaper during the polishing process for metal — you dislodge stubborn crap, smooth out the surface imperfections, leave yourself with a smooth finished surface again. You just use it in moderation and gently as you’re only levelling and smoothing those scratches with the rest of the surface, not trying to fully grind away at that plastic outer layer.
Obviously though you can get scratches that are deep enough that they actually are through the data layer though… that’s when the disk is dead dead… unless you’ve got some special Nintendo coding toothpaste to replace those missing zeros and ones like for like on your scratched up Mario Sunshine GameCube Disk.
A fun fact for anyone interested though, toothpaste also works very well for clearing up the ‘Haze’ on aged vehicle lights. Far cheaper than fancy dedicated cleaning stuff and does the same job because they’re much the same product at the end of the day, just one has more ingredients catered towards human oral hygiene. There’s more than a few tutorials online to follow for cleaning them this way. Speaking from experience though, just be aware that ideally you’d be wanting to give the car a full clean afterwards… unless of course you potentially want dried toothpaste streaks down your bumper etc.
Putting toothpaste on a scratched disk is likely to only result in making it worse, and a tiny chance it’ll actually make anything better.
The “idea” is that the tooth paste will act as a very delicate abrasive in order to remove the scratches on the bottom of the disk. By effectively sanding down layers of the plastic, you can get down to a point to where the scratches no longer exist. This obviously only works if there are no super deep scratches that are almost the entire way through.
A lot of disks, as far as I understand, actually store the information on the very top surface of the disk. If you get “top scratches” on a gamecube disk, for example, the disk is basically ruined even if the bottom side is flawless.
If your going to get your disk fixed like this (the process is called resurfacing) then please use a proper resurfacing machine. They are expensive. If you don’t have one, your local video game store or music store will likely have one. They often will resurface disks for you for something like $1 each.
God, I remember when I had so many CD’s I bought a hand crank CD fixer just so I could listen to a whole song without skips.
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