As the title says why does toothpaste fix disks
In: 2049
Toothpaste is a light abrasive and removes scratches in the plastic top layer. This allows the laser to correctly focus on the data layer below it.
A CD has information on the underside of the label. The basic shape is like a spiral mirror, but with dark spots on it. Information is read by bouncing laser light through the plastic side of the disk, off the mirror, and into a sensor.
A scratch in the plastic disrupts the laser, acting like a prism. It diffuses the laser so the sensor can’t detect it.
Toothpaste acts like a polishing compound, wearing the surface of the disk smooth, and removing enough of the scratch to allow the laser to be read by the sensor.
If you have scratched discs and have access to a buffing wheel, like a table mounted buffing wheel, use some jeweler’s polishing compound and the buffing wheel to restore the disc with relative ease. Most scratches on the polycarbonate surface are very superficial. Unfortunately, sometimes massive deep scratches can’t be corrected, but that’s usually not the case.
Used to work at a plastics manufacturer and their industrial use buffing wheel could polish a disc in just a few seconds.
You’re just polishing out the scratches. Any mild abrasive could accomplish the same thing….toothpaste is common enough that everybody has it, and it’s mild enough that people can use it on their teeth for a lifetime, so there’s little chance it’ll cause more harm than good on a disk. If you got a really scratched up disk, you can use Brasso instead of toothpaste…it’s more aggressive, but still doesn’t have any kinda chemicals in it that will damage the plastic.
The actual shiny part of a disk is what holds the data..the plastic just protects it.
The way to fix a scatched disk is to smooth out the scratches or fill them in with something. I always used a yellow highlighter to fill in the scratches as opposed to using an abrasive like toothpaste to ground down and smooth out the scratches. They used to sell cd “scratch removers” that worked in the same fashion. Coat it with the highlighter then use a soft cloth and rub back and forth from the inner radius to the outer radius as you rotate the disk (don’t rub the cloth in the same direction the laser would read the info). Its great for cd’s but I haven’t tried it on blu ray or even dvd, those have so much data packed in a tight space that it might not work, but its worth a try.
Toothpaste is a mild abrasive, it works as a gentle polishing compound when used on other surfaces. Often there are better abrasives for other tasks (jewelry polish for example), but toothpaste is cheap and available. In the CD era, it was common for any store that sold CDs/DVDs to also sell disc-buffing kits, but it’s a pretty niche product at this point.
Well in my experience it doesn’t…it actually just created many more scratches. Maybe I had the wrong toothpaste or something cuz I was under the same impression and completely fucking ruined my Atreyu CD.
While toothpaste *can* work, I don’t recommend it. I recommend Meguiar’s PlastX instead, because it’s specifically designed to be abrasive to plastics.
Also, for best results, get a microfiber cloth and use that to rub in the PlastX. You’ll need to give it quite a bit of “elbow grease”. Be careful not to crack the disc or let it slide around on the surface you’re polishing it on, ESPECIALLY if you’re using this trick on a CD.
Why? Because the “data layer” on CDs is very close to the back of the disc (the “label side”). If you slide a CD on a dirty surface, you will scratch it. If you scratch the side that the laser reads, you can (usually) polish it back up to some degree. If you scratch the side with the label, and the scratch is deep enough to damage the data layer, that’s it. You can’t fix it, and your only hope is to pray that the damage is small enough that the disc’s built-in error-correction can interpolate what was in the gap. [This is a diagram of what I mean](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg/1280px-Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg.png)
Scratches appear visible because of the indent in the material and the light refracts back from the material making it visible similar to a scratch on paint work, buffing out the scratch with an abrasive polish or toothpaste feathers out the rigid scratch so that the light doesn’t bounce back meaning the laser can read it without distortion
Tooth paste is basically just sandpaper goo with chemicals for your teeth.
The disk itself is a film sealed inside a plastic coat
You’re sanding that coat down a bit to make it smooth, since scratches make it hard to read beneath the plastic
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