CD Player Unjamming

[rwanttaja]

The 6-CD changer in my 2007 SL recently jammed. The dealership swapped out the radio under warranty, but I have to consider what I'm going to do if the same thing happens once the warranty runs out.

Anyone know of a service manual for the 6-CD radio? Failing that, has anyone ever popped open the radio and manually cleared a CD jam? How about, at least, some pictures of the outer casing of the radio so I can make some guesses as where to start?

If anyone has one of these radios that is dead, I'd be happy to buy it from them to experiment with.

BTW, the service manager blamed the jam on my use of "ripped" CDs vs. commercially-recorded disks. He claimed the record-at-home CD media were thicker and caused the mechanism to jam (note that I do NOT use paper labels on my CDs).

When I got home, I pulled out a digital micrometer and measured some disks. A sample of commercially-recorded CDs ran about 1.18 mm, +/- about 3 mm. I had two types of Memorex CDs, the standard blank ones and the printable kind. Both were within the same range as the commercial ones.

All the CDs in the unit were the printable kind, with just text describing the contents. I wonder if the printable surface might have a different coefficient of friction and thus react differently to the changer mechanism?

Another factor (and probably the biggest one) is that I had the player in the "Random All Disks" mode. This meant the changer mechanism had to operate after each song, so a half-hour drive might see it crank 8-10 times or so. I use MP3-formatted CDs, so I can get ~200 or so songs onto each disk.

Each disk contained a completely different category of music, and I enjoyed the mixing of genres resulting from the "Random All Disks" random function (though some people don't like the whiplash, like when the player goes from a Queen song to the WWI-era "Sister Suzie's Sewing Shirts for Soldiers").

I'm considering "horizontally" loading music on CDs rather than the standard vertical setup. In other words, instead of ripping all the CDs by an artist or of a genre onto a single MP3 disk, I'll spread them across five (or more). Running the "Random Disk" mode, then, should get me variety without activating the changer every time.

Ron