Awesome Factories

This fascinating short video shows how a factory adds ink to Mahjong tiles. After placing the engraved tiles onto a platform, a computer-controlled arm uses inkjets to spray precise amounts of red and black pigments onto the right spots on each tile. The machine has nothing on this artist who still makes Mahjong tiles by hand.

This short, but highly satisfying video takes us inside a workshop for a look at how to make perfect spheres from wood. The process involves using a curved cutting blade against a dowel that’s been attached to one end of a lathe. Be sure to check out tesssxkiersten82’s TikTok for more hypnotic woodworking videos.

We love the bright colors and heady aroma of Fruity Pebbles. In this classic episode of Unwrapped, they take us inside Post’s factory that churns out more than 55 million boxes of the cereal a year. The process includes dying long-grain rice, smushing the grains into flat pieces, then coating them with sugar and flavoring.

Your local deli can slice cheese for you, but it’s done one slice at a time. This industrial machine from TEXTOR is designed to cut entire bricks of cheese in seconds. It uses a conveyor belt to push cheese through a rapidly-spinning circular blade. Here’s another one of their machines making quick work of pepperoni and bacon.

The way that steam engines can propel things using boiling water is pretty amazing. This video from How It’s Made takes us inside a factory that makes radial steam engines and shows not only how they come together, but how they work.

Go inside of Italy’s Beta Utensili factory, where they take pieces of raw steel, heat them, hot roll, and machine hammer them into their rough shapes, before cutting them out, sand blasting, grinding, tumbling, and refining their openings before hardening and plating each piece into a finished combination wrench.

Robotime’s latest ROKR wood model lets you build a tabletop marble run that looks like a tiny chocolate factory. Turn the crank, and colorful marbles roll through twists and turns of the maze. The 420-piece model takes about 7 hours to assemble and offers ample challenge for kit builders. We only wish it made real candy.

Manufacturing motors for EVs and hybrids is a very different process from making conventional engines. In this video, you’ll go inside the factory where Audi produces its EV motors, and robots and humans work in concert to transform metal, plastic, and coils of copper wire into a modern and powerful mode of propulsion.

EV maker Tesla takes us on a high-speed drone flight around and inside of its Berlin-Brandenburg Gigafactory in Germany. Along the way, you’ll get closer to the incredible metal stamping and robotic assembly machines than most humans will ever get.

Porsche takes us inside of one of its factories to see how they create a bespoke 911 GT3 from their Exclusive Manufaktur division. It takes two days to build a car from start to finish, with 1500 workers touching each vehicle along the way. This particular specimen is finished in a gorgeous Gold Bronze Metallic paint.

Did you know that plastic bottles are blown like glass? Us neither. Here’s a look at a fascinating machine that takes small plastic tubes, heats them, and then blows them into a mold to make water bottles. The same basic process is even used for big 5-gallon bottles.

In this video from Sumitomo (SHI) Demag, they show how their El-Exis SP injection molding machine makes plastic bottle caps. Each time its molds fill with plastic, it stamps out 96 identical bottle caps, repeating the process every 1.9 seconds. We love that top-down view of all the caps falling to the production line below.

We know that pasta isn’t good for you, but we can’t resist the occasional bowl of carbs drowned in tomatoes, meat, and cheese. Wondastic Tech put together this satisfying compilation of factories that produce pasta, showing off the different machines used to form shapes like tortellini, fusilli, lasagna, and cannelloni.

The paint on classic cars isn’t always in good shape and needs to be restored. If you really want to do the job right, you need to start with a clean canvas. Cars Insider shows us how 3S Chemicals takes vintage car bodies and dips them in a series of baths to remove all the old paint, sealers, primer, and rust.

Even though we upgrade or replace our gadgets and computers regularly, only a small portion of old electronics ever get recycled. Business Insider takes us inside of Sims Lifecycle Services to show how they reuse, repurpose, and recycle up to 6-million pounds of e-waste every month.

Kaman Air Vehicles makes the K-MAX Aerial Truck, a dual-blade helicopter designed for lifting cargo, disaster response, and search-and-rescue operations. In this time-lapse clip, you’ll see how they build one of the choppers, and then how its blades spin without hitting each other. The helicopter can be flown with a pilot or unmanned.

Discovery UK digs into the How It’s Made archives for this look at the process that goes into creating magnets. After melting a cocktail of various metals in an electrical induction furnace, the fiery metal is poured into sand molds, then cooled, separated, and charged with multiple electromagnetic fields.

We’ve taken you inside of a factory that makes plastic bottles, now see how more environmentally-friendly glass bottles are born. New Age Media posted this video of a high-speed production line that takes molten blobs of glass, blows them into molds, then passes them through a series of conveyors as they cool.

Based in Spokane, Washington, Nick’s Handmade Boots has been crafting custom leather boots since 1964. Watch as their highly-skilled shoemakers create each boot, painstakingly cutting, forming, and stitching leather. These Woodsman boots offer the ultimate in traction thanks to spikes made from tool steel.

We’ve seen the strange but fascinating way that rubber gloves are made. Now watch a less efficient but equally satisfying method that involves pouring streams of molten rubber over spinning hand molds until they’re evenly coated. It also looks like a great way to take down a villain in an action movie.

For thousands of years, gold has been one of the most valuable commodities on earth. In this video from Factory Monster, they take us inside the Korea Gold Exchange for a satisfying look at how nondescript bars of gold are melted down, flattened, cut, and stamped into pristine 999.9% pure gold ingots for resale.

Whether you call them “sprinkles,” “jimmies,” or “hundreds and thousands,” these colorful candies are a fun way to add edible decor to desserts. Go inside the Cake Mate factory to see the process that transforms shortening, sugar, colors, and flavorings into this festive topping.

There’s nothing quite as soothing as aloe vera when you get a sunburn. Business Insider visited the world’s largest aloe farm in the Dominican Republic. There’s an incredible amount of manual labor that goes into harvesting and extracting the insides of each plant leaf before it’s ready for use in products.