cnx_vinyl/docs/production-timeline.md

# Production Timeline: Order to Delivered Record

How long an order actually takes, stage by stage. This is the time
dimension of [process-flow.md](process-flow.md), which lists all nine
stages and every check but no durations.

The repo asserts turnaround as the core regional advantage in four
places — "competes on turnaround and freight against EU/US plants",
"in-house galvanics removes days of turnaround", "validate turnaround
against the regional pitch", "get a written turnaround SLA" — without
ever putting a number on it. This page puts numbers on it so the claim
can be tested at Making Vinyl instead of repeated.

**Every figure is an estimate** from industry norms and this repo's own
equipment data. Nothing is vendor-confirmed and no order has ever run
through this plant. Durations are **working days** unless stated;
divide by 5 for weeks, and note that Thai public holidays run to
16–20 days a year, clustered heavily around Songkran in April.

## The headline

| Configuration | Plant-controlled | Including customer gates |
|---|---|---|
| **Launch** (bridge stampers, no in-house cutting or galvanics) | 22–49 days | **~6 to 17 weeks** |
| **Mature** (full chain in-house) | 11.5–22 days | **~4 to 11.5 weeks** |
| **Repress** from an archived mother, no changes | 6.5–11.5 days | **~1.5 to 2.5 weeks** |

These are straight sums of the stage table below, plus 9–35 days of
customer gate time for the first two rows. They are wide because the
stages are wide, and they are not a quotable lead time — see "What to
promise a customer" at the end, which adds queue and buffer on top.

Reported EU/US plant lead times run roughly **10 to 16 weeks** for a
standard black LP, down from the 6-to-9-month peak of 2021–22. That
figure is an industry impression gathered in conversation, not a
surveyed one, and it should be tested at Making Vinyl alongside the
price. One published data point: Record Industry (Haarlem, NL) quotes
**3 weeks to test pressings** (from complete files, or from a supplied
lacquer's arrival) and then **9 to 11 weeks** for the finished order
after the customer approves the test pressings and the artwork
(calculator FAQ, checked October 2026), which on the same reference
point compares with the 7 to 9 week mature quote below. Two cautions on the comparison:

- **It is not like-for-like.** The EU/US figure is a *quoted* lead time
  carrying queue and buffer; the CNX figures above are unbuffered stage
  sums. The honest comparison is against the quote table at the end of
  this page — 7–9 weeks mature, 10–14 launch.
- **On that basis the launch configuration is at parity, not ahead.**
  Its 10–14 week quote sits inside the EU/US 10–16 week band, and its
  unbuffered worst case of 17 weeks is beyond it. The regional advantage
  comes from freight and time zone at launch, and only becomes a
  manufacturing advantage once cutting and plating come in-house. That
  matters, because launch is what the first two years actually sell.

**Bringing cutting and galvanics in-house takes roughly 1.5 to 5 weeks
out of the lead time** — replacing a 13–27 day outsourced metal block
plus freight with 4–7 days of in-house cutting, plating and stamper
prep. The spread is wide because the outsourced block is the part
nobody has measured. That is the commercial case for the galvanics line
stated in time rather than in the stamper cost that
[revenue-model.md](finance/revenue-model.md) counts separately.

## Two tracks run in parallel

A full-service order is not one chain. The metal path and the packaging
path run concurrently and converge at assembly, and **the packaging path
is the one that most often slips**, because it waits on artwork the
customer owes and on a print partner who is not us.

```mermaid
flowchart LR
    subgraph M[Metal and record path]
        A[Audio intake] --> B[Mastering] --> C[Cutting]
        C --> D[Galvanics] --> E[Stamper prep] --> F[Test pressing]
        F --> G[Production run] --> H[Finishing]
    end
    subgraph P[Packaging path]
        X[Artwork received] --> Y[Proof and Delta E approval]
        Y --> Z[Carton and sleeve print run]
    end
    H --> I[Assembly and packaging]
    Z --> I
    I --> J[Fulfilment]
```

Printed jackets from a local carton partner typically need **10 to 20
working days** from approved artwork. That fits comfortably underneath
the metal path, but only if artwork lands early. When a label delivers
artwork after approving the test pressing, the jackets become the
critical path and every day of metalwork saved is wasted.

**Consequence for the order intake process:** artwork deadline is
effectively a fourth approval gate and should be contracted as one,
alongside the three artist gates in
[process-flow.md](process-flow.md). It is not currently modelled as a
gate anywhere in the repo.

## Stage by stage

Times below are elapsed scheduled duration for one title, not touch
labour. The "launch" column reflects the phased entry in
[total-investment.md](finance/total-investment.md): bridge stampers from
Stamper Discs, lacquer cutting brokered through their EU partners or
bought direct (SST in Frankfurt already cuts for Poy Records, see the
[vendor landscape](suppliers/vendor-landscape.md#lacquer-cutting-service-schallplatten-schneid-technik-germany)),
and no mastering room of our own.

| # | Stage | Launch | Mature | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Audio intake and technical QA | 1–2 | 1–2 | Checksums, format, levels, side-length vs format. Rejects here are cheap; rejects later are not |
| - | **Gate: master plan approved** | *customer* | *customer* | 2–10 days in practice |
| 2 | Vinyl mastering | 3–7 | 2–4 | Launch: external engineer or partner. Mature: in-house room, and queue depth becomes ours to manage |
| - | **Gate: master approved** | *customer* | *customer* | 2–10 days; more if the artist wants revisions |
| 3 | Lathe cutting to lacquer | - | 1–2 | Includes test cut, groove microscope, dead-wax scribe |
| 4 | Silvering and electroforming | - | 2–4 | Three generations plus XRF, metrology, mother listening check |
| 5 | Stamper prep | - | 1 | Punch, back-finish, coin, concentricity |
| 3–5 | **Outsourced cut + metal** (launch only) | 10–20 | - | Stamper Discs, Sheffield; queue is theirs, not ours |
| - | **Stamper freight UK → TH + customs** | 3–7 | - | Air freight; nickel travels well, unlike lacquer |
| 6 | Press setup and test pressing | 1 | 0.5–1 | Mold change, stamper mount, warm-up, 10–20 TPs |
| - | **TP to artist + gate: TP approved** | *5–15* | *5–15* | Courier plus listening time. The single largest customer-side block |
| 7 | Production run | 1–5 | 1–3 | Throughput table below |
| 8 | Finishing, assembly, packaging | 2–4 | 2–3 | Trim is inline; shrink and jacket assembly are labour-bound |
| 9 | Fulfilment and dispatch | 1–3 | 1–2 | Bulk pallet, or per-parcel dropship on an ongoing basis |

Two things the table deliberately does not hide:

- **Stages 3, 4 and 5 collapse into one 10–20 day external block at
  launch**, and its duration is not ours to control. That is precisely
  why [roadmap.md](roadmap.md) item 14 calls for a **written turnaround
  SLA** with Stamper Discs. Without one, the whole quoted lead time
  rests on a supplier's goodwill, and they have no documented Asian
  customers to set expectations from.
- **Lacquers do not fly.** A cut lacquer is soft nitrocellulose, heat-
  and shock-sensitive, and wants plating within roughly 24 to 72 hours.
  The launch configuration is sound precisely because it never ships
  one: audio goes to Europe as a file, the lacquer is cut and plated in
  the same region, and only finished nickel stampers make the journey.
  Any future arrangement that cuts in Thailand and plates abroad, or
  the reverse — would be a quality risk, not just a slower schedule.

## Production run throughput

From the fleet assumptions in [scale.md](scale.md), after the 60–70%
overall effectiveness already applied there.

| Fleet | Good records/day | 300 units | 500 | 1,000 | 2,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch: 1 semi-auto, 1 shift | ~300–450 | <1 day | 1–2 | 2–3 | 5–7 |
| Duplex: 2 semi-auto, 2 shifts | ~1,150–1,790 | <1 | <1 | 1 | 1–2 |
| Mature: 2 semi + 2 auto, 2 shifts | ~3,300–5,000 | <1 | <1 | <1 | <1 |

Read these as **press-days, not calendar days**. At mature scale no
single title gets the whole plant; it gets a scheduled slot. Past
roughly 60% utilisation the queue in front of the press starts to
dominate everything in the table above it, and quoted lead time
decouples from process time entirely.

That is the standard failure mode for pressing plants and it is worth
stating plainly: **lead time is a capacity decision, not a process
decision.** A plant running at 90% quotes 16 weeks with the same
equipment that quotes 6 weeks at 50%. Any turnaround promise made to
the market is implicitly a promise to hold spare capacity.

Small runs invert the arithmetic, though not as sharply as it first
looks. At 300 units on the semi-automatic line the run is **5 to 8
hours**, most of a shift, once the 60–70% effectiveness above is
applied; it is roughly an hour on the full mature fleet. What dominates
a small order is not the pressing but the setup, the approvals and the
assembly, all of which cost the same at 300 units as at 3,000, which
is exactly the boutique/color work the semi-automatic
line exists to serve, per
[pressing-line.md](equipment/pressing-line.md). Small runs are not
faster to deliver; they are only cheaper to press.

## Repress: the shortest path in the plant

A repress of an existing title with no artwork or audio changes skips
stages 1 through 3 and all three artist gates. If a **mother** was
archived, a fresh stamper is pulled and the order runs:

| Step | Days |
|---|---|
| Pull stamper from archived mother | 1–2 |
| Stamper prep | 1 |
| Press setup, first-article check | 0.5 |
| Production run (1,000) | 1–3 |
| Finishing, assembly, dispatch | 3–5 |
| **Total** | **~7–11 working days** |

Two commercial consequences worth acting on:

- **Choose the 3-step process and archive fathers and mothers.** Stamper
  Discs offers both 1-step and 3-step. A 1-step stamper is faster and
  cheaper for a one-off, but it is a single-use part: there is no mother
  to go back to, so a repress restarts at lacquer cutting and costs the
  customer six weeks and a new cutting fee. 3-step buys the two-week
  repress, and that repress is the highest-margin order the plant will
  ever take. Decided (October 2026): the plant keeps the **father as well
  as the mother** of every side.
- **How many represses a mother carries.** The common rule of thumb is
  about **10 stamper sets per mother** before it degrades (Third Man
  Pressing's FAQ; a Nashville plater quoted by WPLN, both checked October
  2026); quality-minded sources give fewer: 5 (The VinyLab), 6 to 8
  (Stereo Review, 1962, quoted on pspatialaudio.com). At 1,000 to 2,000
  pressings a stamper that is roughly 10,000 to 20,000 records per side,
  or about ten represses of a few hundred to 1,500 copies. A father grows
  about 5 to 10 mothers (pspatialaudio.com; Third Man: up to 10), so with
  the father archived a worn mother is replaced by plating a new one
  (about an hour in the bath plus the listening check) instead of
  re-cutting, and a title reaches roughly 50,000 to 100,000 records
  before a new lacquer. These are industry rules of thumb, not this
  plant's figures: the galvanics vendors are asked for theirs
  ([galvanics](equipment/galvanics.md#open-questions-for-the-quotes)), and
  the factory application counts stamper sets per mother.
- **The archive is an asset with a shelf life.** It needs the
  storage conditions and the genealogy records that
  [traceability.md](traceability.md) already specifies, and a stated
  retention policy: how long a customer's fathers and mothers are kept before
  they are scrapped or returned. That policy does not exist yet and
  should be in the customer contract, not discovered later.

## What to promise a customer

A defensible quoted lead time is **not** the sum of the mature column.
It carries queue and it carries a buffer, and it should be quoted from
the last customer gate, not from order date — the plant cannot be held
to a clock the customer keeps stopping.

| Order type | Quote | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| New title, full service, launch config | **10–14 weeks** | Stage sum plus external metal queue plus buffer |
| New title, full service, mature config | **7–9 weeks** | |
| New title, customer supplies jackets | **−1 to 2 weeks** | Removes the print path |
| Repress from archived mother | **2–3 weeks** | |
| Rush slot | **premium, capped per month** | Only credible with reserved capacity |

Quote in weeks from **test-pressing approval**, with the pre-approval
stages quoted separately as "typically X weeks, subject to your
approvals". Every plant that quotes from order date and gets caught by
a slow artist ends up explaining itself.

The price calculator on the [artist platform](artist-platform.md) quotes
from this table in exactly this form, and a fan-funded campaign shows its
fans an estimated ship month built the same way: campaign close, plus the
typical pre-approval stages, plus the quote above.

## Honest caveats

- **No order has ever run through this plant.** These are planning
  numbers built from vendor throughput data and industry norms, and
  early production will run slower than any of them while the reject
  rate settles — [revenue-model.md](finance/revenue-model.md) already
  concedes the same about its 5–10% reject allowance.
- **The external metal block at launch is unmeasured.** 10–20 days is
  an industry-typical figure, not a Stamper Discs commitment. Get it in
  writing before it appears in a customer quote.
- **Equipment lead times are absent from the repo entirely** and do not
  affect this page, but do affect
  [project-timeline.md](project-timeline.md), which is where they
  matter.
- **The competitive comparison is the least validated part.** Whether
  regional labels will actually pay for 7 weeks instead of 14 plus
  freight is the same open question as the 3.50–4.60 USD blended price,
  and both should be tested in the same conversations at Making Vinyl.
  A turnaround advantage nobody pays a premium for is a cost, not a
  moat.