Has anyone seen this kind of deterioration on a CD before?
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Has anyone seen this kind of deterioration on a CD before? The disc plays fine but the label layer is falling apart all over the place! Not sure whether to try to clean it off, or risk getting this stuff into my playing equipment.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Aaron Brick — אהרן בריק last edited by
@aarbrk I haven't run into it myself, but the theory is fairly obvious — the printing has been made into an unprotected not-particularly-durable layer.
Compared to magnetic tapes, CD drive mechanisms are downright simple, and flakes of the paint are not terribly likely to be able to cause hard-to-repair damage. Nevertheless, you'd obviously want to make a back-up copy of the disc ASAP, if you don't already have one, and you might be able to prevent future deterioration by applying a protective coat of some sort over the printing. A clear spray varnish might be workable. Try to make sure in advance that the varnish's chemical composition would be sufficiently inert to itself not cause damage over time. Some types of clear epoxy might also work, but these are tricky to apply evenly, and, depending on how fast you want to be able to read the CD, the balance of the disc's protective coatings can be kind of important. (Spray varnishes can be reasonably evenly applied by rotating the disc in, say, a lathe, at a fixed speed, and keeping the spray nozzle in a fixed position.)
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@aarbrk Alternatively, you might be able to cut a CD sticker shaped piece out of transparent sticky-coated vinyl sheet and apply it with a standard CD sticker applying tool. Again, the balance thing is kind of important, so I'd cut it with a CNC plotter-cutter, not by hand. (But in a pinch, a combination of a drawing compass and a scalpel blade would probably get the job done.) A laser cutter is probably not a good tool for cutting an optically transparent vinyl sheet, and attempting to use it for this may be dangerous.