I picked up this CD player for free and decided to try and refurbish it for fun. Imagine my surprise when I found that the disc system uses a caddy. Very cool!
It looks like this repair is going to end early. The front panel kept reporting a problem with the disc, so I opened it up to locate the problem.
What I found was the laser lens floating around inside the case. Very sad. I've seen this type of failure before. There is some kind of glue that holds the lens in place that decomposes over time.
It'll usually work if you superglue that back down very carefully - but it would require very careful glue application for the superglue to not leave white superglue vapour marks on the inside of the lens. Or maybe there's a better glue than superglue for this
You can test the player with the lens just sitting in place, just don't flip the player upside-down 😀
Have a look at this video to see what a repair can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hdfvjbCkdA
