How to Repair Scratches on a CD

In our quest to reuse and restore everyday household items, such as CDs, there have been a number of reuse ideas we have offered our readers, such as how to reuse CDs to make wind chimes, coasters, Christmas tree decorations, room separators (by suspending a string of them from your walls), or even a funky cool lamp.
While these are all great ideas, especially if you no longer want to listen to your music/movie, or game, what if you wish that you could restore that CD back to its original playing condition? Well in that case, grab a tube of toothpaste, rubbing compound, banana, egg, and a towel and prepare to make a little magic.

Theory of How this Repair Works

First of all you can go ahead and make yourself an omelet and a banana split to keep you company during this project, as they do not really do a whole lot for repairing a CD as you may have seen on YouTube or equivalent. While some of you may have received positive results from using bananas and such, I have not, and I must say that the science just isn’t there to back it up.
The theory behind fixing a scratched CD, is similar to fixing scratched paint on your car. The key is to polish out the deep scratches by using a substance that will create very fine scratches, and essentially polish the CD. To do this you can use any number of plastic polishes, rubbing compounds, and some have even reported good results with a metal polish, like Brasso.

Rubbing Compound (Polish) Method

I prefer the good old standby of automotive grade rubbing compound, such as from 3M. Admittedly, 3M polish is not necessarily a green product, it is after all synthetic in its basic composition, but you will need only a dab and quite frankly, there is no natural product that will even come close to the power of this stuff when it comes to resurfacing a badly scratched CD.
The experts tell you to always polish in a straight line from the radius of the center to the outside, rather than polish in circles. While this is good advice for the most part, since small circular scratches have been known to throw off the laser tracking system of a player, most tracking systems today are far superior to the ones we remember from the 90’s. So, if you are willing to let the rubbing compound breakdown to its final stages, circle polishing can work well too.
When I refer to letting the rubbing compound breakdown, I am saying the rubbing compound formula essentially contains a grit that is designed to scratch the surface you are polishing, and wear down the deeper scratches until they are closer to the same height as the rest of the CD. It does this by starting out with a heavy grit, which breaks down over the polishing course into finer and finer grit, until it eventually leaves a mirror polished surface. But this is only if you put enough elbow grease into it.
I have found that circular polishing works just as well as radius polishing, but you can follow whatever advice you like, as this is simply a matter of opinion and personal experience. But what if you need to fix a CD right away and don’t want to travel out to your nearest store to grab a bottle of polish, in such a case, toothpaste works reasonably well too.

Toothpaste Method

Toothpaste is designed much the same way as a rubbing compound, in that it is manufactured with a gritty substance, which gently scratches the enamel on the teeth, to clean and polish them. It can offer your CDs the same service, albeit not to quite the extend as the polish, but if the scratches are not too bad, it may just do the job.
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