Awesome Factories

Jack Flynn and Nick David present a wonderful short documentary about the men and women who work tirelessly to weave, mill, dye, blend, spin, warp, finish, and stamp Scotland’s famous Harris tweed fabric.

We’ve all heard a million times that print is dead, yet publications like the New York Times continue to print hundreds of thousands of newspapers on a daily basis. Motherboard introduces us the three of the dedicated men who keep their presses running 365 days a year.

This fascinating 1950’s footage of English candy maker Barratts Confectioners walks us through the arduous process of making a hand-rolled candy known as “London Rock” – which had its name embedded into each tube of candy.

We love seeing unusual machines work their magic to produce items we take for granted. Here’s a machine that takes spools of stiff wire and twists them into the interlocking rows of a chain-link fence, while another set of tools twists the loose ends together.

If you’ve ever wondered how they make those giant springs used in the suspension systems of cars, check out this footage of a molten hot rod of steel as it’s bent around a moving cylinder, then quenched in a vat of oil to harden it.

After being transfixed by their video of springs being made, we decided to check out some of the other videos on music label INDUSTRIAL JP’s YouTube channel, and each and every one of them is equally as fascinating.

A look inside Nissan’s Canton, Mississippi factory, where hardworking folks have built every single TITAN pickup truck since 2003. We’re still amazed to see how coils of steel are transformed by man and machine into the vehicles we rely on every day for work and play.

We visited Toyota’s 4.2m sq.ft. San Antonio Texas manufacturing plant to see how they build their rugged Tacoma and Tundra pickups. Over 7200 people from Toyota and its partners work in concert with robotics to complete a truck every 60 seconds. (Video by Jim Rough)

Kentucky’s Omega Mirror Products is the last American maker of the shiny dancefloor items of the disco era. In this brief profile from NBC Nightly News, we meet Yolanda Baker, who has been handmaking the mirrored orbs since their 1970s heyday.

This video shows how two-color drinking straws start out by molding hot plastic into a large tube shape, which is then gradually reduced down in size through a series of cooling trays. We’d like to hack this machine to make the world’s longest Krazy Straw.

Science Channel’s always enthralling How It’s Made shares a look inside a candy factory that makes those little colorful sprinkles (aka “jimmies”), and the process that it takes to turn sugar, shortening, and food coloring into the decorative treat.

One of the more unusual bits from the How It’s Made series takes us to a creepy factory filled with hand-shaped ceramic molds that wind their way through a lengthy assembly line, and then dipped in rubber and heated in an oven. Seriously, did Tim Burton create this place?

Watch the complex process of assembling an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet, reduced to just about three minutes. Each $52 million dollar plane is almost entirely handbuilt at Boeing’s St. Louis plant, with robots handling only a small portion of the process.

Liebherr walks us through the process of turning raw sheets of metal into its gargantuan, 600 ton 282 C Haul trucks at their facilities across Australia. The scale of these things doesn’t sink in until the semi shows up to transport the truck’s hopper.

They’re one of the world’s most ubiquitous objects – metal shipping containers used to transport goods around the planet. In this clip from BigSteelBox, we go inside a Chinese factory where the containers are crafted by a laborious mix of machine and human effort.

An incredible demonstration of the power of water, as this high pressure cutter slices cleanly through metal like a hot knife through butter. The 5-axis Kimla Streamcut can slice smooth and precise parts from a wide variety of materials, from foams to ceramics and stone.

We’ve already learned how to make our own gummy candies, but this neat video from Bosch Packaging Technology shows how they’re made in mass quantities. There’s something immensely satisfying about all those gummy bears and worms rolling off the assembly line.

While we were touring the mountains in the new 2016 Camaro SS (yeah, hard life, we know), we dropped by the Bozeman, Montana factory where Gibson Acoustic has been crafting guitars for the last 30 years. Incredibly, almost every step of the process is still done by hand.

We’re always amazed by the strange and wonderful contraptions used in factories to automate laborious tasks. Here, a crafty robotic assembly line picks and sorts salami sticks, grabbing the loose meat sticks and neatly placing them into trays for packaging.

A fascinating sequence from the Discovery show How It’s Made, in which used old tires are shredded and turned into tiny particles which can then be melted down and turned into new rubber mats, in a great examples of recycling what would have once just sat in a landfill.

Despite being a technological dinosaur, there are a handful of people out there using cassette tapes. Through its stubbornness, National Audio Company is the last man standing, and has benefitted greatly from this fact. Original video from Bloomberg Business.

(PG-13: Language) We’re always spellbound by the show How it’s Made. In this video from Jerk Circle, we learn about the little-known sandwich cookie disassembly plant, which breaks down excess cookies into raw materials, producing one-half the flour consumed in the U.S. Or not.