Hello everybody,
My name is Taniel I am a 31 year old Vinyl lover and the CEO of Degritter record cleaning machine company. We are a small business located in Estonia with 8 employees and we released our ultrasonic RCM to the public in March this year.
The project originated from a personal need to clean records that I had been collecting and as I was too lazy to wash them, I started to look for solutions. At the time the only automatic RCM on the market was AudioDesk and it seemed a bit too basic for its price.
So, at the end of 2014 I put together a team of four for building an alternative machine with great cleaning effect, usability, looks and form factor in mind. We started with a team a physicist, mechatronics engineer, electrical engineer and me (IT background) and we estimated that it would take us about 1-2 years to have an RCM available on the market. Had I known then the complexity of the task that we undertook, I would have seriously reconsidered.
Over the years, we:
- accumulated an impressive collection of pumps for testing
- prototyped and tested five types of water sensors with different operating principle
- created 7 iterations of product design before arriving to the current one
- designed and prototyped more than 10 ultrasonic cleaning tanks for record cleaning
- designed and built 8 iterations of working ultrasonic amplifiers
- designed and built 6 iterations of LCD control panels for the machine
- tested two generations of the machine with Beta testers
The downside of all this is that while I see records every day at work, I have not had as much time as I would like to listen to them. I hope that in the next few years this will change