Collect enough vinyl and you’re guaranteed to find yourself with a couple of warped albums that won’t play properly. Maybe you foolishly left them in direct sun, maybe you didn’t store them flat, or possibly you found a wobbly old rarity at a bargain price and figured you could restore it and beat Discogs at its own game.
Photograph: Chris Haslam
It’s hard enough to set up a turntable or pick the right player, but fixing a warped record without specialized tooling (and the associated knowledge to go with it) has long been too much of a pain to be worth it for most.
Turntable stalwarts Pro-Ject is aiming to fix that. It has just launched preorders for the Flatten It, its first dedicated vinyl flattening machine. It’s a ruggedly handsome lump of aluminum, with two 12-inch hot plates that heat and press your precious long players back into shape. Can it save your worst records? In my experience, it does pretty well.
Finally Flat
Photograph: Chris Haslam
There’s nothing especially fancy here, just a highly accurate thermostat offering the ideal warmth to fix your shellacs. Once heated for around an hour, it will maintain a temperature of 136.4 degree Fahrenheit (58 Celsius) and gently iron out any vinyl warping. It will fluctuate just two degrees from this, and once you’ve left for two hours, down to 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), the record can be safely removed.
How long you press a record for will depend on the thickness of the vinyl. Chunky 180 gram pressings will take longer than the more flexible, and harder to warp, Dynaflex records. Before I put the Flatten It to work on my cherished-but-wobbly collection of warped ’90s white labels, I needed to test it on something a little less precious.
