Starting from scratch
with your damaged CDs

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

Some of history’s brightest thinkers have concluded that necessity is the mother of invention. Many modern-day scientists would argue that man’s greatest inventions often come about by accident.
But for Normandy mechanical engineer Rick Sando, unemployment was the catalyst.
When his former employer, Wiremold, moved its 66,000-square-foot electronics accessory plant out of the Byberry East Industrial Park a few years ago, the former machine-shop manager found himself without a job.
Sando was about 50 at the time, with 10 years of service to the company and a quarter-century of experience in his field. But the Drexel University graduate found that age and knowledge can be a tough sell in a competitive job market, where employers tend to look for younger, more impressionable candidates.
Yet, he thought, "I’m too young to retire."
So, armed with his severance package and a unique machine that he developed in his garage, Sando started his own company. Two years into the project, Fortis Automation and its Internet arm, DiscBuffer.com, have carved a unique niche in the entertainment technology sector.
Sando’s invention is a patent-pending machine that refurbishes scratched and damaged compact discs with precision and consistency.
Sando is capable of restoring thousands of discs a day at Fortis’ Huntingdon Valley shop. Meanwhile, he has begun to reproduce his unique Disc Buffer machine for distribution to other companies wishing to do their own disc repair.
Either way, Sando figures, the company has huge growth potential. It already has come a long way.
"The Small Business Administration keeps track of all of it. They will tell you that you have a one-in-fifteen chance (of surviving) in your first twelve months, and it goes down to one in ten in your second year," he said. "And if you hit your third year, chances are you’ll remain alive."
Fortis marks its second anniversary this month. But the business had its genesis years earlier.
In April 2002, a former colleague of Sando’s was working for Electronics Boutique, a national chain of video game and computer software retail stores. The friend supervised the chain’s reclamation department in charge of preparing used game discs for resale.
The process at the time required much labor and proved inefficient. The hands-on work took a long time and yielded a success rate of only about 50 percent, Sando learned. Plus, the equipment used for the process required a lot of maintenance.
With more than 1,000 stores across the country, the chain was taking in thousands of trade-in discs each day at its reclamation facility.
"(But) doing four-hundred or five-hundred discs a day was difficult for them," Sando said.
The inventor spent the next three years developing an automated disc buffer in his garage.
"My neighbors think I’m nuts," Sando said. "They’d come over and see me working in my garage, and one of the CDs would fly off and get stuck in the wall. I still have some scars."
The effort paid off because by March 2005, Sando was ready to deliver a fully automated disc buffer to Electronics Boutique, which had evolved into EB Games and been bought out by Gamestop Inc.
His machine has vertical action, like a conventional drill press, but operates with precision settings for bit depth, pressure, speed and duration that allow it to remove the scratched poly-carbonate layer of a disc without damaging the data underneath. A custom circuit board controls the settings.
The process works for music CDs, videos, video games and data discs. The machine can handle conventional 5-inch discs or 3-inch mini-discs.
It takes less than a minute to refurbish a single disc. His machines process two or four discs at a time. The success rate is 93 to 95 percent, the developer claims.
By August 2005, Sando was out of work and looking to turn his side project into a profitable company. Naturally, it was a big risk. He invested his severance and pension to buy equipment from his old company, which moved its local operations to Connecticut, Mexico and overseas.
He found a shop on Philmont Avenue, west of Red Lion Road, and created Fortis Automation. It took him about 10 months to get patent-pending status for his Disc Buffer.
He awaits the full patent from Washington, D.C. By the time he gets it, he’ll have spent close to $20,000 on the application process, counting legal fees, he says.
The investment is starting to reap its rewards. Orders from large companies for his machine have been steady, while other companies and organizations of varying sizes are using his disc-refurbishing service.
The list includes Netflix and GameFly, both based in California, along with Second Time Around of Ohio, a video chain in South Florida, and the libraries at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. To handle the work, Sando has two full-time employees and several part-timers.
Individual customers can get information at DiscBuffer.com, including prices. The base rate is $2.99 per disc, with discounts for higher-volume orders. If a disc can’t be repaired, there is no charge.
That’s a lot cheaper than replacing damaged discs with new ones or buying replacements from a used-disc dealer.
"For (new) music CDs, you’re paying maybe twenty-five dollars. For Xbox and PlayStation games, some cost seventy-five and a hundred," Sando said.
That contrast alone was enough to convince him that he couldn’t risk bypassing an attempt to market his idea.
"If I saw somebody else doing it years from now, I’d be kicking myself, saying, ‘Why didn’t I try it?’" he said. ••
For information about Disc Buffer and Fortis Automation, visit DiscBuffer.com
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com