How A Record Is Made..Vintage 1956 RCA Records

Toasted said:

That was a serious blast from the past for me. Back in the mid seventies I worked in the RCA record plant in Smith Falls, Ontario, making 45's. Twenty years after this film was made, and they were still making them the exact same way, on the exact same kind of presses, nothing had changed. A few years after I worked there, around 1980, RCA closed that plant and outsourced it to a company called Cinram in Toronto who had all automated machines...and not long after CDs changed the market forever. As I recall Cinram was making nearly 100% of the CDs manufactured in Canada, and exported most of their product to the US.

Thanks for posting..

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madwing said:

very cool! what were those speakers when they were describing "stereo" sound?

and in the mold soundplay?

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Toasted said:

Yep, my job was making 45s for an 8 hour shift...it got pretty dull, actually, as I recall a fast worker on a good shift might make more than 500. The actual effort was to put a label on a little pin on each side of the record mold, then take a blob of hot vinyl from a foot triggered "vinyl dispenser" thingy, plop it in the middle of the label on the bottom mold, and close the press. The press had a timer, and would open up when done. You'd take the pressed record and put it on a cutter, hit a button, and it would spin the record, trimming the excess from the outside and cut the large hole in the middle. You'd take the excess material and put it in a can, this stuff was recycled. Then you'd put the completed record on a spindle. It was loud, hot, and you stood in one place for the entire shift. The presses were steam heated. The labels came in boxes of a thousand, and they arrived wet, we needed to dry them on the metal tables. Leave them too long and they'd burn, too wet and they'd stick together. I used to have a very high heat tolerance, long gone now.

Workers would come by once in a while and take a sample from your spindle and take it to a soundproof room to quality check them. I don't know what the equipment was in there, but it sounded pretty darn good, but looked pretty low tech and industrial metallic. The most frequent fault were easily spotted, little bubbles would appear in the molds, causing dents in the product, the longer a mold was used the more likely you'd get dents.

I found the video intriguing as I saw a lot of people handling records without gloves, and touching the surface of the molds and lacquers, that never happened that I recall, we never touched the surfaces without gloves. We also had to wear hair nets.

And we got no product for free, but pretty darn cheap. Even though it was an RCA plant, we made lots of records for other companies, I remember a lot of MCA product. RCA was on a Country kick when I was there, but they also had David Bowie selling a ton of stuff back then. As a side benefit I also got to meet Charlie Pride and Dolly Parton, who dropped in for a visit. She was nice...and short. And blonde. And...well....you know. Pleasant..

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Toasted said:

Dents were probably the biggest defect I saw in my own record collection, if they were bad, they could even cause skipping. When I was still buying vinyl (sorry, I'm a digital convert) I would open the records in the store and check for obvious flaws and immediately exchange them if they were bad, and some of them were bad. Needless to say, the staff didn't like me very much.

As for the smell, not bad, it was sort of sweet and...ok...for a factory. As for the metal grabber and the master, don't worry, there was no damage being done. I must say that quality really was on everyone's mind, we didn't want to produce crap, and they were sampling all the time.

I was in the business because my father was an RCA executive, he was responsible for all sorts of things, he worked with the suppliers who provided the vinyl, the cardstock that was printed into album covers, etc. I`m sure he`d have had some interesting stories for you. When he retired (thirty years ago) they gave him a gold record with a custom label with his name on it, I have it on the wall here.

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d-ray657 said:

Thank you Ilikevinyl for the link. That adds some appreciation to what we are putting on to spin every day.

It also reminds me of film day in grade school; the black cloth shades that they dropped for the films; the clicking of the projector as the film went through it; the threats from the teacher that we would spend the day writing an essay if we weren't quiet for the film; the spitballs -- it was educational. Bell also made some excellent science films.

Regards,

D-Ray

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drknstrmyknight said:

Very cool!
I may have a new avatar:

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Toasted said:

That was a serious blast from the past for me. Back in the mid seventies I worked in the RCA record plant in Smith Falls, Ontario, making 45's. Twenty years after this film was made, and they were still making them the exact same way, on the exact same kind of presses, nothing had changed. A few years after I worked there, around 1980, RCA closed that plant and outsourced it to a company called Cinram in Toronto who had all automated machines...and not long after CDs changed the market forever. As I recall Cinram was making nearly 100% of the CDs manufactured in Canada, and exported most of their product to the US.

Thanks for posting..

Click to expand...