Awesome Factories

Insider presents a tantalizing look inside the two bakeries responsible for some of the most deliciously addictive sweet treats on the planet, including our favorites – Thin Mints, Tagalongs, Lemonades, and the almighty Samoas (aka “Caramel deLites”.)

A look inside the Duck Brand duct tape factory, where they transform rubber, gauze, and plastic into the super sticky, super strong material that’s a staple of every workshop. We wonder how quickly the Mythbusters could have built their duct tape canoe with that giant roll.

Some of our favorite candy treats are Twizzlers strawberry and cherry twists. In this excerpt from an episode of Unwrapped, we go inside Hershey’s Twizzlers factory, where machines spurt out seemingly endless red ropes and give them their trademark twisted shape.

An in-depth look inside Rapido Trains Inc.’s production facility in China, where workers painstakingly assemble scale model train engines and rail cars. Each model train body is individually molded, masked, painted, detailed, and assembled by hand.

An extensive look inside the Roma Prince pasta factory in Costa Rica where a factory line engineered by GEA Group continuously cranks out a stream of delicious noodle ribbons, ready for us to add pasta sauce, cheese, and meat to. Anyone else craving Italian for dinner?

Eirik Moe captured the traditional process still used today in a soap factory in Nablus. After combining the ingredients of their olive oil soaps, the mixture is poured onto the floor, dried, measured into individual blocks, embellished with a mallet, then hand-cut.

Footage of a machine that quickly makes wooden beads, using a lathe, hole saw and a drill. A square stick of wood is spun on one axis, and is gradually moved into the saw which spits out a finished ball. Here’s a similar machine that’s equally satisfying.

We’re guessing not much has changed about the way candles are made since this film was made over 50 years ago, showcasing the assembly line at Price’s Patent Candle Co. and waxing philosophical (pun intended) about the ways in which candles play a part in our lives.

We recently were given the unique opportunity to fly to Japan to visit Tohoku Pioneer Corporation’s factory. We learned how they design, engineer, and build some of the world’s best sounding speakers, from affordable car speakers to high-end audiophile equipment.

Porsche posted this cool behind-the-scenes video, which shows off some of the assembly process of its awesome gold and carbon fiber 911 Turbo S Exclusive Series. Watching the body meet the chassis was particularly satisfying, as was the Porsche logo on the wheels.

Back in 1995, Michael Jackson asked someone at Sony Music to explain how Compact Discs were manufactured, so they put together this factory tour video just for him, while producing his album History. It’s a fun time capsule, and a perfectly awkward corporate video.

A look inside the factory where craftsmen painstakingly select, attach, laminate, sand, shape, glue, and finish each piece of wood that goes into Bentley Motors‘ extravagant vehicles. We appreciate the lack of music or voiceover so we can focus on the work at hand.

We’ve been meaning to get to the Jelly Belly factory one of these days to check their operation out in person, but for now, we’re happy watch how the tiny, flavor-packed confections come together in this video from Community Balance.

We had no idea that it took so many steps to create a table tennis ball, but if this video of the Double Happiness ball factory is any indication, it’s more complicated than you might think, as discs of plastic are individually heated, curved, trimmed, glued, and tested before packaging.

The next time you launch a rubber band, watch this video as a reminder of the manual labor that goes into the production of these stretchy office supplies, which start as the extract of a rubber tree, which is dyed, dipped onto rods, peeled into tubes, then cut into thin slices.

A fascinating bit of archive footage shot at the London factory for Matchbox cars, showing off how the cars went from concept to wood model, to production. We enjoyed watching the car bodies spin by on the assembly line, and the miniature traffic jam on the conveyor belt.

National Geographic and filmmaker Mile Nagaoka introduce us to Yuasa Town, Wakayama, Japan – the first place make soy sauce, and continues to do so for 750+ years. The process, which involves fermentation of soybeans reminded us of how spirits are made.

A hypnotic video of the people and machines working tirelessly inside the factory of UK confectionary company Simpkins, who has been making its colorful hard candies and packing them up in its iconic round tins for nearly 100 years.

We’ve seen how jawbreakers can be crushed and melted, now watch how they they’re made. Each bone-crunching candy starts out as a tiny compressed sugar pellet, and gradually grows through a ridiculously loud process of tumbling in sugar, flavorings, and food coloring.

A fantastically satisfying bit of factory footage, in which a steel rod is heated and bent into the shape of a giant spring. The fire at the end is because of oil and dirt particles burning off. More hot coil-bending action here.

Tallahassee, Florida confectioner Lofty Pursuits shows off some of their old-school methods for making candies, as they pull melted sugar, crank it through vintage equipment, then crack it apart to create the final forms for their sweet treats. You can buy their candies here.

An old segment from How It’s Made which shows how a steel rod is gradually made thinner and thinner, then run through a metal shaving machine, and woven together to transform it into the scrubby cleaning material we’re familiar with.

A look inside the process of crafting one of the world’s greatest grand pianos, from the careful bending of its frame, to the arduous hand-stringing of the soundboard, and precision placement and tuning of each key. Narrated by the late John H. Steinway.