There used to be all sorts of home remedies as to what to do with warped records. One was to put them between two pieces of glass with a weight on top and pop them in the oven. If you got it just right the record would flatten out. But you had to pull it out at the right time, before burning yourself, and by that time it would be soft, so you would have to remove the top piece of glass and stand it flat until the record had cooled off and gone solid again. If you left it in the oven too long the grooves would start to disappear as the vinyl melted.
Do you remember when 78s were disappearing? There were lots of do-it-yourself articles on how you could heat them and turn them into flower pots, etc.
For those of you who haven't handled 45s, the centres were removable because juke boxes had a big centre boss on the turntable, and even some home record players did. To remove the centre you had to push hard and they popped out. Push too hard and the whole record would split. I lived in England at the time, and I noticed that American imports came with removable plastic inserts, which English issues didn't. When you bought a turntable they always came with a plastic collar that you could put on the turntable so that you could play 45s that had the centre removed.
Years ago I worked for a company in San Franciso that was located at the bottom of a cliff, with a housing estate on the hill above. The local kids, apart from deriving fun by mooning us below, also had a game where they would skim their parents' LP collections over the cliff to see how many could go right over the factory and land in the parking lot. Most didn't make it, and we had to send someone up onto the roof from time to time to collect up all the bits of LPs and dispose of them. I can't imagine what the kids' parents thought had happened to their disappearing record collections.
