Video : Record Pressing at Dureco, Holland

[Aussie0zborn]

This video was produced for the 40th Anniversary of Dureco (Dutch Record Co.) in 1992. Dureco closed down in 2003.

There is a short shot of their record presses followed by their CD manufacturing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK42cGvZ-gk

The CD manufacturing line is a little antiquated. The discs are pressed in batches and then transferred to a finishing line (where it is metallised and a protective lacquer coating is applied) before it is printed. These days discs are pressed and finished in one line.

The CD prinitng process employed here is the "pad printing" process and the big rubber balls are called "tampons". A metal lithographic plate is coated with ink, the ink is transferred to the tampon which in turn transfers it to the disc. Pad printing on CDs soon gave way to screen prinitng which is still used today. With the advent of the DVD and the demand for more photo-realistic on-disc printing, offset printing of optical discs came into play.

I have no idea what sort of record presses these are. Anybody?

[thomas]

Mikey hello,

Gem of a video.

Automatic sleeving on a Lened!

Wonder if it was offered by Lened or their own design.

[Aussie0zborn]

OK, so thery're Lened presses - good work, Thoams.

Lened registered a US patent for a sleeving machine for their press.

[mossboss]

Yes Lened's indeed Quite unusual for Europe, Fabel, Alpha, Taunus, Kraus Maffei and a couple of other brands where the preferred presses
There are still 4 of these Leneds in France sitting in a warehouse and still in the state that they where when pulled out of that factory
Never had a run since Dureco time It seems to be that the Europeans take them out of plants and keep them mothballed so they are not taken up by others to be put into production again
Competition must be quite tough there, as per vpi's presses been taken out as well and these 4 Leneds I do have have some photos of these monsters if any one is interested I will dig them up and post them
Johns Hydraulics in Clayton Melbourne Australia did make a record press using their upright compression moulders and using a variety of dies from local diemakers or from Alpha
Some Johns machines that I saw running some forty odd years ago had no extruders attached to them They instead used a pre heated rectangular sheet of PVC from a small oven sitting next to the press
There was also an engineering firm in Preston that did produce a record press No doubt there was a lot of compression moulding machines converted over to record presses as the process is in essence the same so it not unusual to see oddball brands or no brands at all in some machines

Cheers

[Aussie0zborn]

Yes Lened's indeed Quite unusual for Europe, Fabel, Alpha, Taunus, Kraus Maffei and a couple of other brands where the preferred presses.....

Maybe its because E.W. Pelgrims de Bigard, the guy who owned Dureco also owned Fabeldis, makers of the Fabel record press. When the time came to go fully automatic he probably couldnt bring himself to buy from his long term competitor, Alpha Toolex so he bought American.

Fabeldis claimed to have outfitted over 100 record factories with their machinery with some 200 presses sold to the USA and 100 to Japan.