This was brought in with skipping issues. It would recognize and play the CD but immediately start skipping every second. Eventually it would warm up and skipping would become less frequent.
These units are around 20 years old or so but you can still find them on eBay for $150 – 400 dollars. Definitely worth being repaired or refurbished, especially for the sound quality.
They say the first thing to do with skipping CDs is to clean the laser. The housing was held together with six screws in the bottom. The laser assembly was buried under a upper shelf of plastic that held the LED panel and speakers. Removing it revealed a standalone CD housing that was held by two ribbon cables. I had to unclip the two speakers. The top part of the CD tray was removable after removing a single screw. Then you could further break down the CD player and get to the screws holding the laser with removal of one other screw.
Cleaning the laser didn’t solve the issue, so I tried using white lithium grease on the threaded track for the laser to travel. This also didn’t solve the problem.
I couldn’t find any datasheets or schematics for the CD player. I ended up replacing the entire laser. I could only find a laser online through Aliexpress:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32792648288.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000060.1.49605455eJUZOx
Take a look at the two capacitors visible in the picture up top. It turns out those also needed replacing and contributed to the laser skipping. The large green one was a 10000uF 25v capacitor and the little black one was a 2200uF 16v capacitor.
The CD laser needed another cleaning as it was covered in dust from shipping. With the two capacitors replaced, a new laser and some fresh lithium grease on the tracks I inserted a CD and it worked. The CD did skip for the first minute while the new capacitors reached their potential but after that it ran quite smooth and I must say that Bose music players sound wonderful.
