Why did boiling a CD work?

Factual Questions
21

most plastic shrinks when heated - who remembers “Shrinky-Dinks”? :slight_smile:

critter42

22
      • Plastic explosives do not shrink.
        ~
23

DougC

Now that is strange, I heated up some plastic explosive and it shrank so fast that it seemed like a loud bang, and it had shrunk so much that it had dissapeared.

24

Aside:

Ahhh…remember the days when CD’s were touted as indestructible?

And I just read that the top layer of a CD is thinner, so doesn’t that make it more important to protect the top than the bottom? (Aside from the laser refraction arguement I guess, now that I think of it…?)

-Tcat

25

Well, I was very skeptical about this one. But, thought it might be worth a try if the situation ever came up.

I finally did.

Bought a brand new X-Box game. The disk was spotlessly clean and no scratches. But it refused to play. I have a “data/disk doctor”. But, there wasn’t anything on the disk to clean up or buff out. I examined the disk quite closely. Visually perfect.

I dunked in boiling water, rinsed in cool water, and dried. Amazingly enough, the disk now works. Actually, I think I need to do it one more time, because occasionally during game play it will crap out and say bad disk. But, it wouldn’t play at all before, and I only dunked it a few seconds.

I have no idea what the mechanism for the improvement could be, but it definitely did make an improvement.

This would be a good one for the master, maybe.