Episode 11: How Ken-Tool's T45 Tire Iron Is Made | Exclusive Factory Tour

Hi, I'm JJ Bock, Director of Operations for Rubber-Inc. Welcome to a special episode of In Stock With Bock. Today we're here in Akron, Ohio with our partners over at Ken-Tool. Let's see what's in store for us today. Doug, thanks for having us. Before we go on a tour, can you best out a little about Ken-Tool and what we're going to see today? Ken-Tool's 105 years old. We've been fortunate to have this facility probably 60 years. We're going to see how a T45 was made and kind of go through the whole process. The T45 is our number one tool. Everything we make here is made from domestic

USA made steel and it's USA product. So it's all American made items here in the plant. Fantastic. Let's get started. Let's get started. Well you'll see here, you'll see the start of the process of the T45. There's two different machines that are used here. One's an upsetter and the other's a So he's going to put the knob, the fork, the fork out of the metal on the first head, and then he'll go through and then heat it up and then do the rest of the process, which we'll see in a few minutes. So this is another machine that does similar parts, forts, this is all gas, and then it's

another upsetter. It'll basically, we're upsetting this end right now, so it does different things, okay? So you can see here better So he's just putting this hook on the end That's for the T48 Alright, what's next though? As you can see here This is where all our raw materials come in You're off-loaded here, and then we cut in the link for our billets And all your testing's been out there, right? Alright All your testing has been out there And we blow up our tires off back here We're gonna do that in a few weeks again That's awesome After the cars are formed, they come here to be heat-treated

So we heat treat everything in-house to our specifications And then after they're heat treated they get blasted clean So it takes all the scale off and everything else and it comes out of this machine Which is basically steel shot to blast and clean so they come out basically is pure clean metal We're closed with like very ready to be painted right ready to be painted And then once they leave the hot side they go to the cold side to be painted. Okay, let's take a walk over there This is our welding area where we do all the welding for our tire cages and a lot

of our specialty tools. Everything's welded here. All our tire cages, we manufacture the inventory on our tire cages. We spend all our tubing here, get all our plates sold domestic product. After we weld them, they get painted, labeled, inspected and ready to ship out. Fantastic. All our handles are painted here in house so they come with electrostatically coated with paint so they come through they get painted they get labeled and ready to put an inventory in our warehouse so everything comes through here and gets inspected and ID and labeled and I have no idea how they put this all back on this pallet

it's like a giant jenga there's an art and a science suit which I've yet to figure out so you'll see next in stock with Bob yeah next here's the bars ready to be painted or four ways ready to be painted and four ways are complete. So loaded up goes through and everything follows the same process here. Raw bars and it works all the way up. As you can see, we're an older facility. We're kind of landlocked with our property, but this is my best part of the tour and my best part of the facility. It's called the Little Cuyahoga. It's our little slice of heaven in the summertime.

Oh, this is great. I still have to find somebody that go kayaking through here for us. I'll do it. Next time it starts your way up there and it looks kind of rough. It doesn't look rough, but it looks like a lot of fun This is gorgeous. This is relaxing. Yes, I work out here. We need to surround you though

This is different, you gotta get to throw the machine, heavy pedal is different. That's cool, man. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you very much So this has been an absolute blast. Thanks for having us. I know our viewers will appreciate behind the scenes the score of 14 x 4 tie liars That was awesome. You guys been doing that all day? That was pretty cool. I don't know if I can do it all day, but that was awesome.