How America's Largest Cast Iron Pan Factory Makes Almost Two Million Pans per Month — Dan Does

most people who cook steaks at home will tell you the only way to get a good sear is with a cast iron pan but in the last couple decades cast iron has reclaimed its throne as the king of all cookware in america one of the fun parts about cast iron is you can find an old rusty pan and nurse it back to health or buy a new one made by hand by a boutique metal worker however the most popular cast iron pans are made by lodge cast iron where the family-owned business has been doing it since the 1800s they're available everywhere they're ultra affordable and they do everything you'd want a pan to do so today i'm in south pittsburgh tennessee at the lodge factory to see how their process has evolved over time and how they create one of the most consistent and widely loved products in american history welcome to dan does [Music] the three components of a lodge cast iron pan are pig iron for heat retention steel for malleability and finally scraps and reject pans from all around the rest of the factory the iron comes in and flows out to the pan that's pretty loud part of the fun part of the fun this is the rejects at any point if someone doesn't like what they're working on or there's extra scraps if a pan doesn't pour right it's immediately rejected and thrown in and then if one of our employees sees a defect on a pan anywhere and doesn't like the look or feel of it yeah they'll throw it back in for re-melt so that we don't waste anything oh it's happening this guy must be so good at that claw game everyone makes that joke so that hopper will move it into the furnaces to be melted so here this is what's been filled with all our raw material it gets shaken through that chute and dropped into this container that'll move it so that's how we get everything into the furnace itself [Applause] from here the mix of metals is brought up to 2 800 degrees fahrenheit and then it is slagged or has its impurities removed for the first of two times and then all the impurities in the iron that the rust that you saw the sand and everything is floated to the top down so the robot is actually going in there and clamping it and bringing it out and pulling it out so it doesn't go in the iron from here the molten metal is poured into what is essentially a giant ladle which will be used to transport it to the next stage of the process all the sparks that you see flying we call yellow jackets they sting when they hit you so hence the protective clothing i would have thought they did more than stick yeah they do some of the old-timers used to say if you lick your fingers you could run your finger through the molten metal [Music] now the ladle moves from the melting to the molding section of the factory where it is slagged again before it gets poured into molds made of sand we've seen the melting and now we're going to pour into our molds and our molds have to be able to hold 2500 degrees molten iron right so you just can't use anything so we actually use sand sand just like you would see on a beach somewhere but you know sand melts above 3000 degrees 3100 to make glass well since we're pouring 2500 degrees we don't hurt the sand and we continually can reuse it over and over again part of the thing is you guys move through a lot of sand that's constantly being molded and then remolded right right we're constantly remolding that sand we add certain amount of new sand to replenish the amount that we lose on the castings when we clean them right i feel like people wouldn't know that a huge component of the cast iron game is sand yeah just like they play at the beach we have a finer sand than traditional foundries run our sand is made specifically for our castings let's get up there and check this out let's go so we've mixed all the sand up where we've added the clay and the water we brought it and mixed it up and now it's coming and this this belt then distributes it to our two diesels so here's some sand so the sand is is really it's soft and fluffy you can hold it but when you squeeze it oh my god yeah like a really good snowball so the sand comes in yellow just like you would see but after we poured iron in it and the clay levels burned up and things like that it turns black so the way this works is these come down to stop the sand from rolling through and send it down to one of the lines feeds whichever lines calling for sand at that time and if it doesn't go through either it just gets bent back and back around both systems are full the belt will stop and we won't send any sand out the sand now falls down one of two shoots before being formed into a mold and then filled with the molten metal from before okay so we've seen the stand come down so this fancy machine is it's creating our sand molds yes so how does this work we got a tool that's on this side of the machine called the ramp we got a tool that's on this side of the machine called the swing they face each other inside that chamber we blow this in and squeeze it we pull that pattern out of the way it's on the swing so it swings out of the way there's an impression on that side of the mold he pushes it all the way out retracts the ram now that impressions on that side of the mold we make another mold the front of this mold now matches up to the back of the other mold and then we just continually do that that's one half they match up you can see the gating going across and how all that anything that's a void or a shape in there is the void in the mold and that's where the iron fills it up so one mole does not get you a pan you need the mold and the previous mold yes or the mold in the next mold yes so we're running the 8sk which has a logo on it right now which is our 10 and a quarter which has the deer logo on it is this hot no but it's hard remember how soft that sand was i showed you go ahead and put your finger in there it's very very dense that's what allows large manufacturing to make our castings the same every day now it's time for the sand molds to be filled with the molten metal mixture that we saw earlier so it's like no pan pan that's right and about 10 moles down from there if we wanted to we could knock the sand out and that casting would be solid do you love this part there isn't a part of the foundry i don't love i don't like inventory how's that i don't like inventory though but if you think about what we're doing here we're taking these raw materials that were nothing when it came in the wash in a matter of a couple hours we're making a brand new product right that someone is going to take out of the box and cook a meal in for their family that night so this is where they dump right here they jump off the line here they go in this shaker pan they break up a little bit in there and they go into this big gideon drop [Applause] so right now all these castings are coming up the line and our folks up here know what cassies need to go through which production line okay so they're up here separating the gates and the castings putting the proper castings on to clean the machines and the other ones are sending down to the other thing at large this is one of our more difficult holes right here it's not so much the physical part of it but it's the heat after workers pick through and place pans on their respective cleaning lines any castings scraps or pans that haven't made the cut for any reason are sent back through the factory to the original scrap heap where they will be melted and then used in the recipe for future products these are motors that are spinning in colors and we're shooting this shot oh there it's like a pellet gun yeah so these are the dirty castings that we're going in right to the cleaning machine and you can see there's still quite a bit of sand on them this is how they come out it's still hot yeah they're warm you know what they say about cast iron right it holds the heat for a long time and that's from the pelleting yeah that is from the blasting that we just did [Music] the pans are now washed in an aggressive bath of soap water and steel beads before being sent off to the seasoning part of the operation these feel pretty heavy don't they they don't damage it no it actually does a little burnishing when you grind on the edge you create just a little bit of a sharp edge this will take it off [Music] all right so i can start to smell some oil yeah we're right at the beginning of our seasoning process now so these pans are done right like you could sell this pan it would just be unseasoned correct and before our seedling process that's how we sold them but we used to dip them in a wax and then the consumer had to go home take the wax off coat it in oil put it through the oven and seize it themselves so now we've applied the oil just the soybean oil and you can see that they're all sprayed evenly so from here they're getting heat up yeah we're going to go up in this oven run them in here about about 15 minutes at a really high temperature so this is what i was talking about before about our spot seasoning that drip and if you look close you can see the drips hanging right there yeah go on up oh no way yeah [Music] just right here look over your empire what does this feel like to look at everything going on out here though you take a look at all these passings that are coming down the line you know we're not making them for cars you know we're not making parts for who knows what right and we're making cookware for people to use that's what that's what drives a lot of us here when you first come to work you don't realize that but after you've been here a little while and you understand what we feel every time we make a catholic and you think about the next person who's going to touch this is someone in in their family or some individual is going to take this and make make something with it is that enough poetry oh i'm not done yet [Music] so this is another pile of rejects here so these are ones that our takeoff line people inspect they're the final inspection before we put them in a box okay so this casting is scrap we will not sell this as a first quality caster i mean i have no idea but it seems like at least 10 or 15 percent you're close don't make it it's a little less and that's overall this job this eight skillet we're probably out of three to five but then we have some other ones that are a lot higher but we average out less than ten you wanna you wanna label something oh man you ain't trained i'm making his life more difficult right now no you're not can i put one more on here three three to a side it's tough i can dance i'm amazed every single day now he has a little advantage of you because he's looking ahead so he's inspecting the back side as they're coming down the line if you watch him he's looking i don't have his wherewithal yet no i think i'm losing my cool here already okay push him down i feel like you have to have nine arms should we bring him on board we're gonna bring him on board sorry larry each aspect of the job is actually like its own level of heart all right so we've loaded up the pallets and then now we're going to send them to the monster distribution center yeah we have a distribution center just off site here where we do direct to consumer we pick orders specifically for customers or sometimes they're full pallets you know and they just load them there for us this is our distribution center everything that we make in the factory comes here this is insanely huge it's 212 000 square foot 22 docks it must feel kind of special seeing this monster nfl stadium size warehouse coming from what you guys do over the other shop yeah i'm just trying to think of all the people that were here before us that are here now i think you and i spoke a little bit about that their contribution to get lodged to where it is right now is amazing when you think about it you know everybody who's been here over the years and you know you saw the pictures in there those 25-year club people you know some of our 30-35 years they've been here you know and all this is because of everything they've did through their careers and to sit here and look at this what we ship out daily what we ship out weekly monthly to our customers to our fans if you think about all the people all those molding and you know back in the day we did it by hand that's that's what is amazing to me and all their efforts got us to hear where we're at now is crazy i walk through here and i look at all these aisles and how many people have touched those castings is pretty cool well thank you so much for having us here today man i enjoyed every minute of it i wish i wish we had more people come through to really understand and appreciate what it takes to make a skillet and then make a meal in that same skillet is cool be careful what you ask for you know this thing enough people see this video you're gonna have a tour every day well i don't know about every day but [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Eater

Views: 1,634,419

Rating: 4.9092436 out of 5

Keywords: cast iron pans, cast iron, cast iron skillet, making cast iron pans, how cast iron pans are made, melting iron, molten iron, cast iron pan mold, how to make cast iron pans, eater, eater.com, dining, foodie, handmade cast iron pans, how to make, factory, cast iron pan factory, cast iron pan machines, lodge cast iron, lodge cast iron skillet, cast iron pan, lodge, seasoning, seasoning cast iron, molten iron sand mold, inside the factory, factory production processes, how its made

Id: NEQP94YbYFo

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/tetrasodium]

neat. I have a relative who used to work for lodge (It's south Pittsburg TN not PA). I recommend stopping in to checkout the shop & look through the defect ones on sale, you can get a lot of reallllly cheap rejects with a cosmetic problem or something

[u/trazzer13]

Fun to watch, thanks for posting

[u/kniebuiging]

English language, I love and hate you. or in other words:

TIL that fabrication can be used for counterfeit/forging as well as normal manufacturing...