Novus Plastic Scratch Remover Review

Any consumer of computer gear, gadgets, or home theater equipment knows that their stuff starts to look a little worn after a while.  It doesn’t take long at all before your shiny new iPod gets a few unsightly scratches, diminishing its value and distracting from the gadget’s coolness.  PC enthusiasts can carve deep gouges in their cases during the course of system maintenance.  Let us not forget that scratches can also destroy data on those new BluRay and DVD discs.  All of these minor scrapes and scratches not only make your equipment look dated, but lowers its value.

There are a few plastic polish products out there (usually marketed as a CD restorer), but from my experience they just don’t work.  If you want to completely eliminate any trace of a scratch, then you need a professional product.  Novus makes a 3-step plastic polish, which is sold direclty to plastic fabrication shops, and claims to restore plastic, lucite, plexiglass, acrylic, and just about any other plastic polymer to its original finish.

NOVUS No. 1 Gently cleans all plastics without scratching. Leaves a lustrous shine that resists fogging, repels dust, and eliminates static. Resists finger marking. Contains no abrasives or harsh chemicals. Leaves a smooth, clean, greaseless shine.

NOVUS No. 2 Removes fine scratches, haziness and abrasions from most plastics. With repeated use, NOVUS No. 2 restores faded and discolored plastics. Removes the damage instead of filling it in. Buffs out quickly. After restoring, seals with a coat of polish.

NOVUS No. 3 Removes heavy scratches and abrasions from most acrylic surfaces. Use when damage is too severe to be restored with NOVUS No. 2 polish. Requires use of NOVUS No. 2 for final finishing. Not recommended for use on coated plastics or eyeglasses.

The following is a list of some of the products for which NOVUS Polishes are recommended:

• Auto Interiors, Gauges, Chrome, Lenses & Acrylic Paint
• Turntable Dust Covers, Stereo Faceplates
• Compact Discs, Video Laser Discs, DVDs & CD ROMs
• Acrylic Aquariums
• Telephones, Pagers, Scanners & iPods
• Acrylic Trophies & Awards
• Plastic Display Cases & Signs
• Gauges & Instrument Panels
• Safety Shields & Goggles
• Video Games, Pinball Machines & Jukeboxes
• Copiers, Computers & FAX Machines
• Acrylic Furniture

There are three different bottles in the kit, a heavy scratch remover (3), a fine scratch remover (2), and a plastic polish (1). Depending on how deep the scraches you’re trying to remove will determine which bottle you should try first.  If you have a noticable gouge in a CD then you’ll need to start with #3 and work your way up.  If you have some very minor scrapes on your iPod the you can probaly buff them out with the #1 polish.  You should use a lint-free micro-fiber cloth (which TAP plastics also sells), else you may introduce new scratches while trying to remove the old ones.

The Novus kit does what it advertises: it removed pretty much every scratch from nearly everything I tested it on… it’s just a matter of how much elbow grease was required to achieve satisfactory results.

This kit may be attractive to those who have a ton of CDs, DVD movies and games that have become scratched over time.  While the Novus kit will restore polycarbonite to its original sheen, it can take a LOT of work, depending on how bad your scratches are.  If you mostly need to repair discs, then you are better off purchasing an appliance that just repairs CDs… they only take a minute or two to restore your CD to a “like new” state.  As mentioned in one of our previous articles, you can try different abrasives in a cheap kit, but will have to run your CD through a few cycles to get any noticable results.  If you’re serious about CD repair, then get a profesisonal kit (which usually costs a few hundred dollars).

The Novus kit is much more useful for the PC enthusiast who needs to buff out scratches and discoloration from their cases, screens, monitors, cell phones, ipods, and just about any other modern technological gadget.  The kit works very well, but you have to put a significant amount of elbow grease to completely eliminate a single scratch.  It restores the plastic to like-new staus, even sun-tinted or smoke-stained acrylic can be restored.

I have purchased a few items that were “refurbished”, which only have some minor cosmetic blemishes on the acrylic, but it otherwise fine.  You can save a bunch of money by restoring items, or even make money by restoring your old gear to resell.

As mentioned earlier, this is a serious professional restoration product, and is sold by plastic fabricators.  You can buy the entire Novus kit directly from TAP Plastics right here.