Awesome Factory

Beyond the Brick shares a noisy, yet hypnotic look inside one of the production lines at LEGO’s Kladno, Czech Republic, as a nearly endless stream of freshly-molded minifig parts roll out of sifting machines to be stamped with graphics to give them their identities. We love the part at the end showcasing all the designs.

Footage from Shandong Iraeta’s factory where they manufacture steel grinding balls. Watch as tubes of metal are heated, then forged into molten orbs which roll down an assembly line before landing in a cooling vat. The music makes it just that much more dramatic.

Leica Camera shares footage from their spotless factory in Wetzlar, Germany, as technicians assemble their minimal new M10 digital rangefinder cameras. They may not have the mechanical complexity of film cameras, but the craftsmanship is still impeccable.

Corning Museum of Glass shares footage of a machine which produces lightbulbs, as a ribbon of molten glass is shaped through a mix of heat, air, and gravity. The now-defunct assembly line was in an OSRAM Sylvania factory and produced as many as 1600 bulbs per minute.

For many years, sheet glass was was made by blowing glass tubes, then cracking off the ends and scoring them, slowly reheating and cutting them open, then ironing them flat. This brief video from Bendheim Art Glass demonstrates the key steps of this nearly lost art.

Every Soyuz microphone is made by hand. This video shows but a few steps in the painstaking process of creating each microphone. Even the individual holes in each diaphragm capsule is hand-drilled. If you have any doubt how good the result is, just listen here.

Super Deluxe named their video series “Stoned Mode,” as the clips they’re featuring are perfect viewing material for when you’re high. So smoke ’em if you’ve got em, and enjoy a fascinating look at how vinyl records are made.

More than 50 years after its initial creation, Jaguar started building a handful of new E-Type sports cars with aluminum bodies. Watch the British automaker once again handcraft this beautiful car in this 5-minute video from inside Jaguar’s Coventry factory.

Footage of a relatively simple, yet ingenious 4-axis industrial milling machine that can cut, engrave and shape up multiple objects simultaneously. These sort of machines are most often used to make decorative woodwork, furniture legs, or small sculptures.

The Science Channel’s How It’s Made take us inside the Scleich toy factory, as a dinosaur design goes from sketch to digital and wax models, to molds, resulting in an injection-molded figurine ready for handpainting and assembly.

Thanks to their unusual texture, Razzles fall somewhere on the continuum between candy and gum. Watch how a sugary mix of dextrose and gum is turned into powder, then pressed back into pellets using a massive amount of force.

CAT recorded this time-lapse of the construction of one of their massive 50-foot-long, 600,000 lb., 4,000 hp 797 mining trucks – a vehicle so big that its assembly must be completed at the job site. There’s no audio, so feel free to hum a tune.

Who here among us knew that cinnamon is actually tree bark? In this short clip from our friends over at Foodie, we go inside Sumatra’s laborious process of scraping and harvesting the bark to make the tasty and versatile spice.

This strange and hypnotic contraption is another single-purpose robot, designed to delicately pluck young plants from a cramped pallette and replant them into larger packages for sale. Watch as it transplants countless flowers without a hitch.

The New York Times checks out the Wilson football factory in Ohio. Take a look at the old-fashioned process of making an NFL football, as narrated by retired sewer Jane Helser (who believes Deflategate was no accident).

This incredibly complex machine takes spools of fiberglass, Kevlar or carbon fiber and braids them together for form a durable composite. Similar techniques are being used to make lightweight automotive and airplane parts.

Alden Gleason shot this captivating video of the assembly line at Julie’s Organic Ice Cream. We dare you to watch the whole thing without running to your freezer to see if you have any ice cream bars. That chocolate bath looks so good.

Airbus took MinutePhysics on a multi-country tour of its facilities to show how thousands of minds and millions of parts come together to design, build and test its new A350 airliner. Worth watching just to see the Beluga in action.

We recently went inside the Stern Pinball factory to see just what it takes to make a modern pinball machine. Fortunately, the day we were there, they were working on The Walking Dead, which made the visit doubly sweet.

John Neeman Tools demonstrates the complex and time-consuming process of forging one of its beautiful Damascus steel knives, handmade by master bladesmith Chris. This makes us so happy that such craftsmanship is still alive.

We’ve seen how Crayola makes its crayons today. Now let’s check out what the process was like decades ago, with the help of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and some soothing jazz music. “Handfuls of of yellow cray-ans.”

A steel mill worker watches as a batch of wet scrap metal is lowered into a melting furnace, which can be extremely dangerous. But he doesn’t seem to be in any rush to leave the room. Fortunately, he finally makes the right call.

WIRED recently went inside the Crayola factory for a brief tour of the colorful and messy process which turns raw wax into about 12 million crayons every day. Sesame Street covered the same ground 30+ years ago, with fewer robots.