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 Post subject: Inside Technidisc
PostPosted: 23 Mar 2022, 14:47 
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The following is from a conversation I had with a former Technidisc employee. I made minor edits (readability), and it is shared with permission. This is strictly going off of that person's memory, so take from it what you will.

Quote:
This was a large factory that had four different cleanroom modules inside of it. In front was the mastering module. It was both a cleanroom and it had filtered light. They had three other modules that were devoted to laserdisc and one to CD. Entire production lines from beginning to end inside each module. They had positive air pressure: each of the clean rooms was being pumped full of clean air from a HEPA filter. Any leaks will be pouring out clean air rather than letting dirty air in. They also had a giant library room full of rolling shelves that contained stampers in canisters. One item I liked was a very old laserdisc player that they had rigged up to play master discs. Because it was working with a mirror image of the data it had to play backwards. They had one engineer who actually knew what he was doing. And a bunch of potheads who did the actual work. Every once in awhile he would come in and check up on them and straighten out that work. Each of the modules was crewed by a different group. Laserdisc modules were ran by entire families. It ran 24 hours a day and they worked in shifts. Some would live at home while the others were working, then switch. Module one was ran by a man named <Name 1>. Module two was ran by a guy named <Name 2>. Automation ran mostly by pneumatics and Allen-Bradley ladder logic programmable logic controllers. Prices were hand operated, but they added automation piece by piece over the years.

When each of the laserdisc modules ran, they had a lady who sat in a room with about a dozen laserdisc players of different models. They would give her samples and she would sit there watching every disc playing simultaneously, looking for any kind of dropout. If she saw anything, production would stop and the issue corrected. Most of my laserdisc collection are vintage test discs. The engineers would grab samples to see if they were working or not and then throw them out and I would take them. Most don't have labels and only a few have jackets. Some were side A on both discs, but I usually didn't take those. I got a couple of good ones in my collections like the Star Wars set, take right from the factory floor. I think they caught a few people stealing the test samples and selling them at a local video store. I never sold mine. I just kept them to watch.

The real collectible gems were the radio CDs. Back then they would mint CDs with a collection of songs for the radio stations to play. We would get one CD with 15 songs. 5 rap, 5 rock, 5 country. They would ship them to radio stations, and they would only use the five tracks they needed. Whatever the top songs at the time were, they were on the playlist. Near the end we made a few CD-ROMs. There are a couple of collections of women in swimsuits as JPGs. Plus we made the Rush Limbaugh Mega Dittos screensaver CD. Last time I visited the old Technidisc building, it was a warehouse for cellphones.


Fans of the format have been trying to decipher Technidisc mint marks further. Do you happen to know any more detail on this: 025-085-649C 5H9H# ? We know 025 is Image Entertainment, 085 is August 1995, but no clue on other numbers. I’m guessing it has something to do with the day or possibly the modules you are talking about.

Quote:
No because they moved stampers between modules. I think those numbers were used for what shelf it was on in the storage area, but I don’t know if there is any other meaning. I know they would make three or four stampers for every job incase one had a flaw they would switch to the next. So that might have been the way to tell the different stampers apart.


Quote:
Did you ever notice that some laserdisc manufactured there have metal that goes all the way to the edges, and some have it that only goes partly to the edge? The last few years module 2 got a sputterer for metallization, replacing the vacuum chamber. So any disc that did not go all the way to the edge was from the sputterer. The German manufacturing video had a big metallization chamber that looks a lot like the one in module 1.


Did Technidisc use injection molding?
Quote:
We had two large hydraulic injection mold presses that could do laserdiscs. We had seven small ones for CDs and later bought a faster one for CDs that could produce faster than the other ones combined. The modules had the press at the far end. Automation would reach in and grab the clear disc. An operator would stand there with an air hose with anti-static air and blow on the disc. It would then be picked up and put on the drum for the metallizer. Once they had a full drum, they put it in the metallizer and ran it. From there they were unloaded and ran through a conveyor belt that put on the glue and other side. They were then pressed together. From there they went outside of the cleanroom to a finishing room. There was a lady that would grind the edges smooth, stick on a label and put in a white sleeve on a cart. These carts were then shipped out of the building to a different facility that would put them in the packaging and ship them wherever.


Quote:
I remember one time they were taking some samples off to an electronic show, then realized the width of the tracks was badly out of range on the samples. It was too late to make replacements, so they had to stand there and say “Our discs are just like these, but they will be right.” We had one engineer who was fixing stuff. He would come in and see that everything was working right. Then go away for a few months and things would slowly get worse and worse. He’d come back and set everything right again. He was one of the engineers at Technidisc.
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