Awesome Factories

Stetson has made some of the best and most desirable hats since the 1800s. Their cowboy hats are beloved, though some can cost up to $5000. Business Insider provides a look at Stetson hat factory to see what makes these hats so special. One big difference is that the produce their own felt in-house.

There’s nothing like a deli sandwich stacked high with thinly sliced meat. Such delights are made possible thanks to the electric deli slicer. How It’s Made takes us inside the Hobart factory to see how they assemble these useful and ubiquitous carving machines. We would have liked to have seen the metal casting process too.

We’ve seen two different ways how NOT to make candy corn, now watch how the pros do it. This 2014 clip from The Washington Post takes us inside of the Jelly Belly factory in Illinois for an explanation of the “kernel” making process starting from individual ingredients until they’re bagged and show up on store shelves.

LEGO fanatic Bricksie first shows off his massive collection of minifigs, then heads to the LEGO Store in the West Edmonton Mall for a look at a new addition – an inkjet printer that can create custom-printed Minifigs. The figures can be embellished with full-color printed clothing including icons, doodles, emojis, and text.

Ever wonder how they get all the nails in a box to lay in the same direction? In this all-too-short and all-too-silent video clip, they show how a pile of randomly grabbed nails immediately point in the proper direction when dropped between a pair of electromagnets. Here’s another machine that does it without human intervention.

Everyday car tires are made mostly by machine, but the high-end tires used for racing are made by hand. In this clip from Street FX Motorsport TV, they take us inside Michelin Motorsport’s HQ in France for a look at the tire-making process, building up layer by layer of rubber, textiles, steel, and adhesive on spinning drums.

Enjoy this hypnotic look at a machine designed for the high-speed production of paper cups. It starts with flat sheets of paper, rolls them onto a form, glues the seam, adds the bottom, and eventually rolls the top edge, cranking out as many as 130 cups per minute.

Traditional conveyor belts can move items along a single axis. But Cellumation’s unique system can shuffle items around in any direction. It uses a series of hexagonal modules, each of which has three sets of wheels. Its controller and software can then be programmed to shuffle and arrange a payload in any pattern.

Disposable plates are typically made from paper or plastic. The paper ones are easy to recycle, but plastic is more challenging. As a green alternative, India’s Vistaraku makes biodegradable plates and bowls by stitching together and pressing leaves of the Palash tree. Apparently, the leaves have natural antibacterial properties.

YouTuber popaspartacus offers up a tour of the factory line at Aticream Company, in Transylvania, Romania. If you’re like us, you’ll work up an appetite as a mechanical ballet of vanilla bars skinny dip into a chocolate bath, and a carousel of sundae cups gets filled with festive flavors.

Thanks to the series How It’s Made, we’ve seen the production process behind hundreds of items. The Efficient Engineer’s video explains things at a much higher level – not the process of making a specific product, but the principles behind modern manufacturing and how factories decide which methods to use.

Yonex is one of the most respected brands in tennis, and their rackets are the choice of many pro players. Tennis Warehouse takes us inside the Japanese company’s warehouse for a look at their production process, which seamlessly blends a human and robotic workforce.

Next time you get a cut and slap a bandage on it, remember this factory video in appreciation of all the engineering and operational complexity that goes into producing that little thing you stuck on your skin. There’s something incredibly satisfying about watching all of those roller machines running.

When you think about it, it’s pretty impressive how a tape measure can neatly coil up 15 or more feet of metal into a case you can clip onto your belt loop. Science Channel’s Machines: How They Work dissects the modern tape measure to show us its inner workings.

Denver-based Hammond’s Candies offers another glimpse inside their factory, where a pulling machine gradually stretches candy in such a way that it appears to change from a deep navy blue to a brilliant electric shade. The effect happens as more air is introduced into the sugar, improving the candy’s chew at the same time.

We’ve seen how individual blacksmiths and blademakers painstakingly handcraft knives one at a time. This factory footage from Sweden’s Morakniv shows us the opposite – how robots and other machines crank out thousands of knives each day. Humans are still involved in the assembly and quality assurance processes.

Those springy playground animals are something we’ve taken for granted since we were little kids. But a whole lot of work goes into making each one of these durable aluminum and steel playthings, as you’ll see in this factory video from the Science Channel series How It’s Made.

Think of how strong a steel chain can be. Then imagine the forces that must be necessary to shape and connect its links. In this video from Engineering and Architecture, we get an up-close look at a specialized machine that takes lengths of steel wire, then scores, cuts, bends, and presses the pieces together.

How It’s Made takes us inside the factory for WEGA, makers of high-end commercial espresso machines. There, industrial machines transform sheets of steel into parts, then skilled workers assemble dozens of components, including a large copper and brass boiler that sits at the center of each machine.

Some fishing lines are monofilament, while others are braided from multiple strands. Science Channel takes us inside a factory that produces braided line, combining numerous microfibers into a single strong one, then bathing them in dye for color. They show how they make a smooth line that’s been coated in resin.

Just how did those crunchy and sweet flakes of cereal made it into your bowl this morning? The UK edition of How It’s Made takes us inside a factory where they take various grains, pressure cook, flatten, toast, and sugar-coat them to make a deliciously carby start to your day.

There’s something immensely satisfying about this video of the SANOVO OptiBreaker, a specialized assembly line machine which ingests over 200,000 eggs hourly, gently cracks each one, then separates the whites from the yolks. It also can wash itself automatically.

BionicHIVE’s unusual warehouse worker robots not only can scurry about on the ground, but they can hook themselves onto tracks on shelving units and climb vertically. They can load and carry small packages and take up very little space so that shelving units can be placed closer together than normal.