"William R. Walsh" writes:

Hi!

Units exposed to water can have all sorts of weird problems occur,
especially in electromechanical devices like cd players where there are
very fine tolerances.

You don't say. :-) I recently had a major sewer failure cause a backup of
water into my basement. Nearly none of the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives that
went under remain functional. It seems that the oldest drives took it a lot
better (and held up to being cleaned in a much better way) than did any of
the new ones. The drives run and "try to work" but I think that things
inside the laser pickup got dirty when the water came along. I don't really
know how to take laser pickups apart, if it can even be done. (And I have no
desire to accidentally fry my eyes if the pickup were not to be quite
correctly put back together.)

The safety risk is minimal. It's more an inssue of if it's even possible to
disassemble without totally messing up the alignment, breaking tiny wires,
etc. Almost any contamination on the optical surfaces will cause the
pickup to either not work at all or have degraded performance.

--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ Mirror: http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/
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