TUBALCAIN Takes Field Trip to a Screw Factory

good morning is tubal-cain once again and I'm headed on a field trip today it's been quite a while since I've gone on a field trip and it's early in the morning it's about 7 o'clock here in Illinois and I'm just now getting on route 39 heading north toward Rockford where I will start the field trip now I'll be visiting with man by the name of Josh Clark at a plant that manufactures nuts and bolts and screws I've never been there but I'm going on invitation hope the traffic isn't too heavy here in Illinois but I have to stop and pick up my partner in crime who I often travel with the white you've seen him in other videos he's the tractor puller so you've joined me on several of those trips so it's raining lightly I think it's gonna clear up a little bit about 45 degrees and this is the last little bit of winter here were the spring won't quite come but we're really anxious for it but I'm also anxious for this trip and what we can learn and what we can see here in Rockford now Rockford was a major metalworking City and perhaps still is just all kinds of industry there in metalworking and josh said that they make an awful lot of nuts and bolts screws and fasteners they still do but originally Rockford was a woodworking town and because of the need for screws and fasteners the screw industry grew up around the woodworking industry but I suppose that's over on her years ago so hope you enjoy the little trip today and I'll be happy to meet this mr. Clark I haven't met him except on the phone so see you in a few minutes we're in the Illinois Valley and about to cross one of the longer bridges in Illinois this is the Abraham Lincoln bridge here at LaSalle Illinois crossing the Illinois River that tower you see over there I'm not sure and lated tower is a cement plant there's large quantities of limestone around here so there was I guess still is a thriving cement to business a lot of back waters here that's all flood now because we're still in the spring the main channel and this is really a busy river here with barges and moving grain primarily large quantities of grain and right at the end of the bridge here we'll be crossing over you're not going to be able to see it but right now the Illinois and Michigan canal that connects I read that towpath quite often on my bicycle but that canal connected Chicago with the Illinois River at LaSalle Peru and would pretty much put out a business shortly after it went that fer was started because the railroad parallels it and then when the Illinois River waterway opened with the deep channel and dams and all of that in the 30s that that really put the kibosh on the canal and but it's still it's owned by the state at a very pleasant place to ride bicycles and to walk and recreational dishes up here maybe are not interested in some of us but we will be crossing route 80 so this is a rather important corridor route 39 meets route 80 and of course this is core in the country but it's too early for any of the crops to be put in I'm near a tree Grove Illinois this was the birthplace of Wild Bill Hickok this is a brand-new plant here that processes silica sand and that rail spur there at brand-new where they load the hopper cars with fracking sound however I guess the oil price is low enough now to where this is not as active as they expected but I'm sure it'll pick up with the entire Illinois Valley has enormous deposits of silica sand and did a lot of glass making where I'm from and that was the st. Peter's sand formation I'm getting off here at Mendota to pick up my buddy but that large green elevator there also has a one-mile loop of rail track there that is used to load cars with corn but they've got a big construction project going on there you might be able to see the cranes and they're building a plant to grind wheat into flour now we don't raise wheat around here but the wheat will be brought in our rail cars and it's all about the usage I guess of the rail system up here it's Burlington Northern and you see a lot of grain trucks matter of fact there's one ahead of us that would be empty constant flow of hopper trucks like that one just turning off up there and I'm stopping at McDonald's here to get one of their best meals you know I don't care for their food but they've got three things right the senior coffee the Egg McMuffin and the French fries well I've come a hundred and three miles and here it is behind the Hinkley truck and is there a parking place error just the handicapped and we're here [Music] here we are at Rockford secondaries this is the main entrance [Music] Here I am indoors and this is Josh the owner and president and probably CEO and all of that so how do you do Josh I nice to meet you josh is gonna show us around and he's been here basically since he was a little boy coming with his grandfather so he has cutting oil in his blood yeah you can smell the cutting oil as you come in the door it's quite old it first and enjoyable so on with the tour this is Jim Clark the founder of the company in the early years and then areas and in 2010 before we go out into the shop let me make a few comments here about some of the samples I have as well as things that I wanted to say about the operation there is called secondary operations and thank you josh Clark so much for being a great host and inviting me and my friend there so I could see behind the scenes what goes on and Josh has incredibly devoted to this operation he's been there since he was a young man used to hang out with his grandfather there when he was just a boy so he grew up with that cutting fluid in his veins and spends long hours there and seems to enjoy every minute of it now when I went into the factory it was a little bit different than what I expected I expected rows and rows of screw machines that would have bar feeders on them that as the stock would come in as 12 or 20 foot bars and then be a machine but that's not the way it was all of the products here that you see both finished and unfinished are what I guess are called secondary operations and that's why the name of the company is what it is so for instance here well let me say a couple other things and I'll talk about some of these samples here there's no computers no see and say this is all school old school and great stuff because you can kind of understand what's going on and you know you can see the cutting going on now the photography won't will not be real great bits that's hand held camera kind of jerky it's noisy in there so there was not a lot of dialogue that's why I'm doing this clip here talking a little bit about that Josh explained a lot of things to me about what was going on in the machines but I did not record that probably unfortunately but I thought I would come back and do some of that and and then I did not and we were there for at least two hours a lot of these machines are 50 years old or older they don't make them anymore but he had a large quantity of used ones in the back room which you'll see and those are either parts machines or they can be brought out into the floor it hooked up and run but he said he has a lot of trouble finding workers the Rockford Public Schools cut out their industrial arts vocational some years back as did almost all schools throughout the United States so there is just a shortage of workers he gets people in there hires them and they are very enthusiastic for a couple days and then they do not come back they just disappear from the face of the earth and I told you that is so true also in that video I made about from the hammer factories watch that video if you haven't seen it but they can't get people that are willing to work hard or nor do they have the skills so they don't have the basic skills even on measuring and that's really important in a factory like this one thing that really surprised me is that they do almost all the measuring with micrometer I don't mean digital I mean standard micrometers like this you'll see them on most of the machines they do not favour calipers and then some of the inspection then there's also done with optical comparator so you'll see a couple examples of that I sometimes call those a shadow graph I do have one myself I'd like to get it up and run and do some demonstrations on that but that kind of surprised me that it's all old-school measuring but yeah they're producing fine products and millions of parts every day all right this is how the parts come in and you'll see that later in the video but for instance this part is brought in and really only one or two things are done to it and you'll see the machine that does this the groove is put on here and this little taper it's always done this is stainless steel then it probably goes out and has some other work done this is part of an ice cream scoop most of you will recognize that so that's a big customer of theirs to make these you can see that's just a secondary operation now here's a bolt I'm not sure what this goes to because they do work for a Honda and in Toyota and Louisville and a lot of Chrysler Fiat and there is a big plant there near Rockford in Belvedere hence the the model well you won't remember the model Belvedere well you won't remember the model Plymouth Plymouth Belvedere is were named for the city so some of these products here just go out then and get me I don't know if this is threaded but you know there are other operations sometimes threading pleading and I don't know what all these parts are some of them he explained to me but for instance this little part here this is the raw material that's the finished one all they did was to put that little round end on there but how important is that so that and then they make millions of those and then looking at these are pins for roller chain and they did all different sizes remember 50s and 35 and you know there's I was going to pose a question one time how many parts are there different pieces in one foot of number 35 roller train it would be interesting to know this part here that's the raw material the way they receive it that is brass it goes into a propane grill a name that everyone would recognize but there are some things that he didn't want repeated and I understand that but then these go and are still plated before they are you actually installed in the final product and the importance here was that it would be spark true so that's what they're making out there are a lot of other things as well and they had sometimes run millions of them maybe sometimes maybe only 50 thousands and then change the setups on the machines I asked him how long it would take to make a change the setup let's say from making this part to this part and I suspected a whole day and he said yeah sometimes it takes a whole day to set up a machine and he does most of the setup himself he would have great difficulty in finding somebody that was capable of doing that so again thank you Josh so let's go out in the factory there's a lot of footage some of it may not make sense to you I didn't get enough shots of the vibratory feed bowls and I thought that is a such a neat operation and what that does is to orient the parts as they are fed you know just in bulk it'll turn them the right direction and you know then they'll end up coming down a ramp like this to enter the actual chucking device on the machine so all right that's enough gabbing and let's let's go out and look at it I hope you enjoy the video [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] identical for the one the repair shop [Music] [Music] [Music] to get water then what that does [Music] that's what the Russian [Music] [Music] [Music] graveyard [Music] these are fair machines ready to go to work [Music] there's the graveyard very birth [Music] Dean father days 10 billion party [Music] vipir authorities bowls that looks like brand-new these are brand-new meatballs never put into [Music] whether grinder lord [Music] register B machine this was the way they come in [Music] [Music] ice-cream scoop [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] people who make the quarter million pieces in here [Music] water [Music] the water really [Music] [Music] they're always ready to be trip [Music] oh yes sir I usually [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well I'm leaving the factory here at Rockford and we're heading back toward home 103 miles had a great visit with Josh I hope you liked the video and the footage that I shot there and will be of some interest to you and continue to watch my video is this a tubal-cain saying so long for now [Applause] you

Channel: mrpete222

Views: 65,041

Rating: 4.9343934 out of 5

Keywords: brown & sharpe., brownies, threading, machine shop, bridgeport mill, south bend lathe, lathe

Id: BF1TcwuRT50

Length: 40min 53sec (2453 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 15 2018