
Marco gave me a tour of the pressing process starting right from the bags of vinyl pellets that get loaded into the hopper. From my horseback riding days, these bags were reminiscent of the bags of oats we haulded around, but instead of feeding horses, the Viryl team is feeding our need for records.

While I watched, they did a switch over from pink to black vinyl. This usually results in some pretty cool looking mottled effects that are sadly discarded unless they are unique enough to make it onto the wall displays around the factory.

In addition to the relative ease in changing vinyl colour, the WarmTone has also been designed for ease in changing stampers. In the past, when press runs were in the thousands, stampers could be left in the presses for days at a time. Now orders are often only in the hundreds so stampers may need to be changed multiple times in a day. These change-overs can take a couple of hours on old machines, but only ten minutes on a WarmTone.