On Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 2:08:11 PM UTC-4, Dave Platt wrote:
In article ,

Wow Dave, thanks for all the ideas!

Any idea in brick and mortar where I can buy 99%?

I'd also like to find something that won't leave lint like a qtip has.

I've cleaned and re-tested and it's definitely doing better! It's picking up disks from the library in 1 to 3 tries that were taking 10 or 20 tries. It plays homemade but takes a while to pick them up. I didn't check if they're CD+R or CD-R. (I always used +, but these weren't all made by me.)

I think I'd stick with cleaning the lens area for now, since the spiraly thing looks clean, and I can imagine how easily I could damage something. I'll tuck away the ideas though, in my tool chest for projects. I was thinking I'd try that idea of cutting off to get the reader further near the outside just to take a good look, but then it will have a disk in it. I wasn't able to get that disk out by hand.

I had no idea CD books are done with a less expensive method similar to home burned. Of course, I hope this isn't all indicative of a weakening laser beam. If the cleaning is helping, and I know it was a smoker's car... so maybe it's just a little haze on it. I just pulled out some professional music CDs tonight. I'm not seeing a difference in acceptance rate, so that's a good sign. Of course some of these bands aren't big and may have burned their own CDs.

I've just done a bunch more wiping with the 91% tonight, so maybe I'll try it again before hunting down more.

On the wire harness, I nicked one of the wires (very tiny spot) trying to get that thing off (even the dealer service person had trouble. For testing it doesn't matter, but I'd like to patch when I put it all back together. I'm thinking a touch of white lithium on the tiny little bare exposed nick will do well enough. There's no remote way to wrap electric tape around that small a wire kind of near the casing.

Thanks for all the education!!