Awesome Factories

Take a surprisingly quiet and soothing journey inside of FCA’s Toledo Assembly Complex, where Jeep manufactures its Gladiator pickup trucks. Watch as an army of Kuka robots do the welding and body construction, complemented by a team of skilled humans who do much of the detail work to assemble the finished vehicle.

After building a LEGO Technic-powered machine that cranks out yummy tapas, The Brick Wall an even more whimsical assembly line. This machine not only produces toy cars, but makes them out of carrots and cucumbers so you can eat them after you play with your food.

South African bathroom fixture company Ceramic Industries takes us inside of their Betta Baths factory for a look at the production process for its bathtubs. Each one starts out as a flat sheet of acrylic, which is then heated and formed using vacuum molds, covered with a fiberglass and resin spray, then baked.

Easter just isn’t Easter without some Peeps. Take a 360º video tour of the Just Born candy factory with Food Network to see how these colorful marshmallow treats are born, including a part of the assembly line called the “Sugar Shower.” Did she really use the word “peepsinality” or were we just hearing things?

While there’s something to be said for pricey limited-edition watches, Timex has a reputation for producing high quality time pieces that are still affordable. Go inside the Timex factory in Cebu, Philippines for a look at how they crank out so many watches, while still producing them with quality.

A look inside a factory in China where Odear tennis balls are made. First, sheets of rubber are cut into pellets which are then molded into semi-circles. Then, the sections are combined, hand-wrapped in felt, and then heat-sealed together. Now all we need is a tennis racket to play with.

As we’ve moved away from print and towards digital reading, highlighters aren’t as popular as they once were. But these fluorescent pens are still pretty cool for making art. Science Channel’s How It’s Made shows the process of molding the plastic bodies, filling their nibs with ink, and testing them for smooth flow.

When you pop open a bottle of wine, it’s easy to forget that its stopper comes from a tree. This footage captured by oenophile Jamie Goode at Portugal’s Cork Supply shows us the labor that goes into cutting pieces of cork tree bark, and punching out individual pieces. We wonder what they do with the leftover bark.

Popular Mechanics presents the best kind of factory video – one without narration or commentary. This clip will get your sweet tooth buzzing as workers at Hammond’s Candies plant make candy canes, marshmallows, and other goodies the old-fashioned way. The Denver-based company has been creating sweet treats since 1920.

While humans are still very much a part of assembling vehicles, robots are often used for the heavy lifting and dangerous tasks like painting and welding. Watch in awe as an army of 45 KUKA robots work in harmony at MAGNA Presstec to create frames for the Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV.

This excerpt from Science Channel’s How It’s Made takes us inside of a factory that churns out millions of paintballs every year. It turns out these painful projectiles are basically made from the same stuff that gummy bears are made of – though we bet they don’t taste as good.

The Big Green Egg is one of the most desired objects for backyard cooks, with its ability to turn out delicious charcoal grilled foods year round. Now, take a trip inside the factory where they’re made, and see how their ceramic construction has more in common with making pottery than making conventional grills.

In this vintage 1959 newsreel from British Pathé, we go inside a UK factory where they transformed gold bars into incredibly thin sheets of gold leaf. According to the narrator, a single gold bar could cover 9000 square feet with the leaf it produced. We’ve got tendonitis just watching the guys doing the hand-hammering process.

It may not be Christmas quite yet, but it’s always a good time for candy. Sit back, relax and enjoy the fascinating process behind the creation of these colorful holiday treats, from machines that pull hot sugar, to ones that transform a 100 lb. block of candy into a thin and twisty rope.

In the mood for some ice cream cake? Check out this footage that Michael Wilson-Roberts captured inside UK ice cream maker Wall’s factory back in 2002, as machines churn out delicately rippled layers of ice cream and chocolate for those fancy looking Viennetta frozen desserts.

If you’ve ever wondered how trees are turned into plywood sheets, this video will answer your question. Paulownia shows us how a log is shaved into a ribbon of flat, pliable veneer, which is dried, layered, glued, pressed, then trimmed to form strong, flat boards.

Take an up-close look at the surprising process that goes into making the stacked fins of a heat sink. Rather than casting the aluminum cooling device, they’re made by shaving the fins out of a solid block of metal, and bending them into place.

We previously visited a speaker factory, but couldn’t share any video footage. How To has posted a pair of videos which show a bit more of the process. After the metal speaker baskets are prepared, it’s a time-consuming process to attach each part with just the right amounts of specific glues as each speaker spins around.

We’ve seen footage of pencils being made before, but the guys at Faber-Castell want us to know that their process is the best. Watch as they make black leads from graphite and clay, and colorful ones from powders and wax, then sandwich them into wooden shells, and paint them to match.

Urban explorers The Proper People, Broken Window Theory, and Tobi Urbex take us deep inside a defunct textile factory in Italy. Along the way, they encountered all manner of items just left to rot, from countless vintage computers, to company records, to numerous articles of clothing… and huge mounds of pigeon droppings.

We always thought that round candies were made using molds, but it turns out some of them are made by spin-carving spheres from a rod of sugar, like the ones shown in this video from candy machinery maker Loynds. We want to see a Bingo ball picker that works this way.

Exceptional Engineering takes us on an in-depth tour of the massive BMW motorcycle factory in Spandau, Germany, where it takes humans and robots working in concert just two hours to crank out one of their S1000RR superbikes from start to finish. Each motorcycle’s 4-cylinder engine is also hand-built in the same facility.

Insider visited Dr. Martens’ only shoe factory in the UK to give us a peek at how the company makes its famously tough-as-nails shoes and boots. The factory employs 50 people, who make about 100,000 pairs every year.