· 1 min read
The plant in February
A pressing plant visit, and what eleven months of lead time actually buys you.
pressing
Hollow Press
We went out to the plant in February, partly to sign off a test pressing and mostly because we had never seen the machines that make the thing we sell.
The lead time is not queueing
We had assumed the eleven-month lead time was a queue. It is not, or not mostly. It is plating, test pressings, a round of approvals, a second plating when the first one has a fault nobody can explain, and then the actual press time, which is about four hours.
What we changed afterwards
We now budget for two rounds of test pressings rather than one, and we stopped promising release dates to artists until the plates are approved. Both of those came directly from standing on that floor for a day.