Ever wonder how the fortune gets into the fortune cookie? How toothpaste gets into the tube? Or how sheet metal is welded into a shiny new car or motorcycle? Having traveled thousands of miles and personally visited hundreds of factory tours since 1992, we invite you to explore some manufacturing mysteries of the world. Since most of the tours are free, and many give free samples, factory tours and company museums remain the best vacation value in America. Come along for the ride!
Read the article we wrote for the magazine Leisure Group Travel, and see our mention in Travel & Leisure.
Your guide to factory tours,
Karen Axelrod
Author and Factory Tour Consultant
On the gearhead factory trail that runs from Hyundai in Alabama all the way up to Harley-Davidson in Pennsylvania, Subaru of Indiana Automotive (SIA) in Lafayette, Indiana, is not too far out of the way—and it may be well worth the detour, as SIA is the only Subaru factory in the United States. At the plant, which opened in 1987, Subaru builds three models of car: the Outback, the Legacy, and the Tribeca, made here for North and South America. SIA handles both manufacture and assembly, turning sheets of raw steel into finished cars. But this is not the only attraction for visitors—SIA is full of surprises. The plant is located on grounds of 820 acres, which include a two-mile test track and extensive wooded areas that have been designated a "Backyard Wildlife Habitat" by the National Wildlife Federation.
Departing from the building's public lobby, tours of SIA take place on a mile-long stretch of catwalk above the vast factory, which sprawls over an area of more than 3 million square feet. The immense scale of this plant and its operations is brought to life by a few statistics. The factory has nearly 11 miles of conveyors (seven miles in the paint department alone). The transfer press used to stamp out body parts from rolls of steel is three stories high—not including another two stories under the factory floor. Working in tandem, the employees and machines at SIA crank out 20,000 cars per month.
In the stamping section, newly shipped rolls of steel are uncoiled, flattened, washed, cut, and formed into the major body parts of each car. An overhead crane delivers coils of steel from the storage area to the blanking press, which flattens them into sheets and then slices them into "blanks" in roughly the shape of car parts. From here the blanks go to any of five massive transfer presses, where 500 tons of pressure shape the steel into finished parts.
Body assembly is where robots and associates assemble the parts into a vehicle. A typical car has 4,000 separate welds, nearly 99% of them made by the 266 robots operating here. Doors, hoods, trunks, and tailgates are also added at this point, as well as sealant on the doors for protection against leaks. Next comes the paint shop, which has three levels and 74 robots.
The area for trim and final assembly is where robots leave off and human beings really take over. Here more than 600 employees join painted car bodies with engine and drive components. They install wiring, lights, and interiors, combine bodies and frames, and assemble the drive and suspension components. Once parts have been installed and the cars are filled up with gasoline, oil, and brake fluid, each is sent to the tester line for quality control. The cars are then washed with a high-pressure water bath and then prepared for shipment anywhere in North or South America.
This tour will be featured in the next edition of Watch It Made in the U.S.A. Meanwhile, you can read about other tours in the current edition of the book.
Guided tours of the gifting facility take you into the center of the operation. You start with a video and a brief history of the company, which began with the single small cookie store that Debbi Fields founded during 1977 in Palo Alto, California. After this introduction, you head toward the bakery, a sizeable space about as large as a basketball court. There are no passive viewing windows here: you don a hairnet and step right into the action. The strong aroma of cookies that greeted you when you set foot in the building now surges and fills your head with the bliss of baking pastry as staff members deftly prepare trays of cookies to be whisked into ovens.
The packaging lines are in the bakery too. Gift batches of freshly baked cookies are set in colorful tins or decorative baskets, complete with hand-tied bows. You then follow their progress to the warehouse and shipping dock, where gift packages are sent all over the United States. Perhaps the most amazing thing here is the giant storage freezer. At 20,000 cubic feet, it can keep a city's worth of pastry fresh until shipping. Tours end at the outlet store, where you can find gift packages of cookies made right in the bakery.
This tour will be featured in the next edition of Watch It Made in the U.S.A. Meanwhile, you can read about other confectionary tours in the current edition of the book.