Awesome Factories

We’ve seen all kinds of specialized factory equipment over the years, showing off some ingenious engineering to perform repetitive tasks. One of the more satisfying machines we’ve seen in recent times is this contraption that rapidly applies stickers to lemons as they glide along on the conveyor belt below.

Modern rice cookers are made from metal and plastic, but traditional Korean rice cookers are made from stone. This fascinating video from Factory Monster takes us inside a company that creates the bowl-shaped cookers and their lids by cutting them from a 9-ton boulder. The English subtitles are quite entertaining.

While most of the toilets in the world are made using machines, there are still places where they are made by hand. This video takes us inside one such factory in Pakistan, where workers pour bucketloads of clay into toilet-shaped molds, assemble and smooth the leather-hard clay, glaze it, then fire it in a giant kiln.

This sped-up video shows how workers produce those big steel wheels for trains. They start with a rod of molten-hot metal, flatten it with a mechanical hammer, work it into a clean round disc, press grooves in the wheel, then punch a hole into its center for an axle. Here’s how a more automated factory does it.

If you’ve ever wondered how they make the wire mesh material used in screens for doors and windows, wonder no longer. This video from Hebei Kaiye Machinery Equipment Co. shows us how a computer-controlled machine takes thousands of strands of stainless steel wire and weaves them into a screen pattern.

Factory Monster takes us inside a facility that produces knit sweaters. The first production line dyes thread and winds it onto paper cones. Then another team loads the thread into electronic knitting machines, which knit panels. Finally, knitters assemble the panels on sewing machines and do the finishing work.

Goldthread takes us inside a factory that makes special good fortune candies, each of which has a meaningful Chinese character in its center. Using soybean, black sesame, and maltose, their artisans handmake each rope of candy by stacking contrasting layers then stretching them smaller and smaller to reveal the letters.

Another day, another fascinating piece of factory equipment. This time, we’re looking at a device that ingests thousands of fireworks and arranges them into a satisfying hexagonal shape for packaging. It uses vibration to shake the empty shell casings into place before a worker ties them together.

There are still places on earth where they make bricks by hand. Conversely, this factory in Korea cranks them out by the thousands. In fact, they make more than 100,000 bricks a day using machines that sift crushed stone, turn it into a slurry, extrude brick logs, slice them into individual blocks, then fire them in kilns.

Factory Monster takes us inside a steel foundry in Korea that receives over a million tons of scrap metal each year, melts it down in massive industrial cauldrons, then extrudes the metal into H-beams for use in construction. There’s something so satisfying about the warm glow of molten steel.

A matchstick seems like a simple little thing – a piece of wood dipped in flammable chemicals. But this video from Wow Things shows just how many steps it takes to turn timber into thousands of tiny sticks. Pakistan’s Kite Safety Match factory in uses a mix of humans and machines to produce matches and their packaging.

We’re fascinated by the variety of machines you find in factories. This particular device is fairly simple – a couple of rollers and a spinning blade. But it’s the stroboscopic optical illusion that occurs when it spins up to speed that makes it so satisfying to watch. Somebody needs to turn this into an endless loop.

If you’ve ever wondered how they get all those little ink dots into dice, this video shows one of the more modern methods. This special printer uses a camera to detect which side of each die is beneath it, then deposits tiny droplets of ink into each pip. Here’s another machine that doesn’t care what angle the dice are at.

As long as you can deal with the tears, peeling an onion at home isn’t a big deal. But if you need to peel thousands of onions a day, you need some serious industrial machinery. This food processing machine from Finis takes onions straight from the farm, orients them properly, removes their ends, and peels their paper-like skins.

Heavy-duty cardboard tubes are used to protect rolled goods in transit and provide forms for concrete construction projects. SBS Tube shows off the production process behind these large tubes, which involves gluing together numerous individual strips of brown paper around a metal roller.

This video from National Geographic dates back to 2012, but we figured Funyuns are timeless so what the heck. The clip takes us inside one of Frito-Lay’s factories, where the crunchy fake onion rings are cranked out by the millions every day. In case you were wondering, they’re made from puffed cornmeal, much like Corn Pops.

This wonderfully satisfying machine sprays out an even layer of batter onto a spinning platter, cranking out perfectly round crepes in seconds. When each one is done, a mechanism ejects the delicious disc onto the assembly line.

Ever wonder how they make basketballs or other bouncy rubber balls? It’s not as simple as just blowing up a rubber balloon. Science Channel’s How It’s Made visited a ball factory to walk us through the fascinating process, which includes making an inflatable bladder, then wrapping it in nylon thread and a segmented rubber skin.

Mega Process takes us on a tour of Zion Industrial Co., which apparently is the last shovel factory in South Korea. The laborious process starts with freshly-cut oak trees, milling the timber into boards, sanding until round, trimming, then splitting, steaming, and bending the wood to hold the shape for its handle.

If you’ve ever received a giant box from Amazon only to find a tiny item rattling around inside, you’ll appreciate this video. What you’re about to see is a Sparck Technologies automated packaging machine that first takes a precision scan of an object, then cuts and folds a custom box that fits perfectly, reducing waste.

This video shows the kind of terrifying catastrophe that can happen in a metal factory. J.D. Christopher shared this footage of a fiery disaster on an aluminum extrusion line that he described accurately as opening “a portal to a demon dimension.” Fortunately, nobody was injured in the incident.

This fascinating video from GWIN TECH shows how a factory quickly cranks out lightweight plastic boats. The blow molding process involves filling a plastic bladder with hot air and then stamping them together with giant dies while the plastic is still pliable.

Charged with moving the pistons in and out, a crankshaft is like the beating heart of an engine. While crankshafts need to be finished by machining, they start by forging and stamping steel, then twisting the molten metal to form the journals and counterweights that comprise this critical car part.