Ian Locke's email of 5 October 2026 after Making Vinyl Europe:
- Budget of USD 250k for VSP, VSF and VSC confirmed; his time, spares,
shipping and travel extra; itemised quotation on request. The
total-investment block keeps its estimate until the re-base, the
difference (+190k low case / +80k high case) goes into the
not-yet-rolled-up table.
- Current specifications filed (VSF and VSC 2022, VSP 2023) plus the
VSF/VSP/VSC line-up drawing (4958 x 833 mm); the 2021 issues move to
sibert/specs-2021/. VSC is now 1000 kg with split OD hydraulic / ID
pneumatic forming; VSF 0-30 psi, 4-station head. Crane table, supplier
map, vendor landscape and the plant page details updated.
- Fully automatic VSPa exists; Sibert offers to move features to the VSP.
- Electroforming: OMS (Optical Media Services, Lou Wullms) named next to
Pheenix; added as a third galvanics candidate with open questions.
- Sequencing advice (presses, boilers, operators and live feedback loops
first) recorded in the exhibitor briefing, roadmap item 23, and as
digital-factory design decision 9 (operators see the data first).
Rebuild docs/plant-operation.html from the single P1 press into the mature
plant: Newbilt Duplex (two HRP 12 on a VEX 50, EX 35 for splatter), two
Newbilt Classic automatic presses with edge trimmers, label punch and
Granulator 400; Pheenix Alpha PASU, PPPU, two PDPU and PMPB; Sibert VSF,
VSP and VSC in that order; father and mother archive and the stamper rack.
Time runs at 1x real time with speeds up to 3600x. Press cycles are
Newbilt's (Classic 28 s, Duplex ~30 s), plating follows Faraday's law at
the PDPU current, and the operator steps use the galvanics.md table, with
unpublished times marked as estimates. Titles flow through the three artist
gates in days; test pressings unmount and the presses run approved work
meanwhile; worn stampers and represses come from the archived mothers.
Two shifts, unplanned press stops sized to scale.md's 60 to 70 %
effectiveness, and demos for a steam dip, a new PVC lot and a repress.
The boiler and chiller are shown at 800 kg/h and 500 kW (estimates) and
the detail panels flag that scale.md's 400 kg/h and 250 kW are Duplex
figures; scale.md itself is unchanged.
Also commits the galvanics.md cycle-time table the page runs on (one PDPU
covers demand, the second is redundancy) and updates the README and the
test-site descriptions.
docs/equipment/pheenix-alpha/: the four Pheenix Alpha electroforming flyers
(2024: PASU silvering, PPPU pre-plating, PDPU dual-cell plating, PMPB
passivation bench), renamed from their download hashes.
docs/equipment/sibert/: the VSP, VSF and VSC technical specifications
(2021), plus Sibert's 2008-09 optical-disc SPS literature and the 2008
Blu-ray stamper characteristics paper in sps-optical-disc-2009/. Two
byte-identical duplicates in the download were dropped.
New docs/equipment/galvanics.md, the metal-path counterpart to
pressing-line.md: datasheet tables for both ranges and what they change.
Pheenix is a second turnkey galvanics vendor next to Digital Matrix and
can quote lacquer-to-record as one vendor; neither range includes water
treatment. Utilities from the sheets (~27 kVA connected per line, DI water,
12-20 C cooling water, extraction sizes), ~5.6 m2 of footprint, and a cell
count estimate (one PDPU at the low end, two at the high end). The Sibert
machines are single-phase, 200/250/600 kg on castors, centre manually and
list no data interface; the VSC locates on the punched hole; the finisher's
water carries nickel. Weights, cycle times, prices and mould fit are listed
as quote questions.
Backlinks and small updates: README (bullet, layout tree, vendor list),
roadmap items 6 and 23, vendor landscape, supplier map, exhibitor briefing
(on-file notes, Sibert three-phase question answered), digital factory
(Pheenix PLC data, Sibert data question, RFQ clause 5), quality automation
(hardness on the centre slug, BD paper as the acceptance-spec model),
sustainability (finisher water), total investment block label (numbers
unchanged), scale (galvanics feeder note), crane weight table, process
flow, pressing-line stamper-fit question, plant page detail lines.
grabowski