Gather sufficient vinyl and also you’re assured to search out your self with a few warped albums that received’t play correctly. Possibly you foolishly left them in direct solar, possibly you didn’t retailer them flat, or presumably you discovered a wobbly outdated rarity at a cut price value and figured you possibly can restore it and beat Discogs at its personal recreation.
{Photograph}: Chris Haslam
It is arduous sufficient to arrange a turntable or choose the fitting participant, however fixing a warped document with out specialised tooling (and the related information to go together with it) has lengthy been an excessive amount of of a ache to be price it for many.
Turntable stalwarts Professional-Ject is aiming to repair that. It has simply launched preorders for the Flatten It, its first devoted vinyl flattening machine. It’s a ruggedly good-looking lump of aluminum, with two 12-inch scorching plates that warmth and press your valuable lengthy gamers again into form. Can it save your worst information? In my expertise, it does fairly effectively.
Lastly Flat
{Photograph}: Chris Haslam
There’s nothing particularly fancy right here, only a extremely correct thermostat providing the perfect heat to repair your shellacs. As soon as heated for round an hour, it is going to preserve a temperature of 136.4 diploma Fahrenheit (58 Celsius) and gently iron out any vinyl warping. It would fluctuate simply two levels from this, and when you’ve left for 2 hours, all the way down to 86 levels Fahrenheit (30 levels Celsius), the document might be safely eliminated.
How lengthy you press a document for will rely on the thickness of the vinyl. Chunky 180 gram pressings will take longer than the extra versatile, and more durable to warp, Dynaflex information. Earlier than I put the Flatten It to work on my cherished-but-wobbly assortment of warped ’90s white labels, I wanted to check it on one thing rather less valuable.
