Building a PLOW from Scratch in 3 hours 4K

[Applause] guys this is the first time anyone's ever been allowed to go behind the scenes and film the process on how Arctic can build a brand new snowplow from scratch raw materials to a finished product out the door and they do a one snowplow every 3 hours and I'm going to take you guys along for the [Music] good morning you guys I'm heading into Arctic headquarters and we are going to build one of their pushers from scratch to finish in just under 3 hours and you and I are going to get to see exactly what they do to make that happen so let's get this thing [Music] going everything comes in the Arctic Factory has either flat sheets of metal or tubular frame but from there it gets handcrafted into the pushers that we see and what they're building right here is the Famous mle Board that floats up and down this is step one getting it bent to that perfect you shape to help make that snow roll out in front of once the raw mle board is shaped to the exact right specifications it moves on to the next [Music] step Arctic employs 60 people a year round building pushers and snow plows fulltime but they employ over 1,500 people plowing snow seasonally and the history to Arctic came when they decided that they needed to build a better Pusher for themselves [Music] angle you didn't get on that [Music] after the technician gets everything hand tacked and ready to go the part the mle boards get loaded into the robot for final welding and you'll see that in just a moment but before the robots begin welding they go through the entire mle board touching it with their sensors to make sure that they have the absolute correct distance for the weld to make sure that they have a very consistent steady even weld so the robots go through and measure the entire mle board memorize everything and then they turn on the juice and let her okay all right so what we just saw on the moldboard W welding cell was before the robots actually struck an arc and started welding the parts yeah they stick the wire out of the torch just a little bit they give I think about a/2 inch out of the torch M and what it goes is it goes and it pokes the parts and it finds where the two pieces of metal actually meet to find the weld seam just in case that parts off just a little bit it'll actually use the wire it'll find the weld seam and it'll remember where it actually is on that one specific part so it'll go around find all the seams and when it's ready it'll go and strike the arc and use those corrections to give us a perfect well Aha and that's called touch sents yes all [Music] right so what's with the shrink w cuz you're just going to unshrink wrap it right yep yep so we have to shrink wrap the pallets of the mold boards just due to safety concerns so we're picking these up with a forklift we're moving around on the shop floor of course a great operator might be able to move without them falling off but we need to be safe if an operator has to stop a for Cliff or make a quick turn to avoid an accident we don't want a pile of 140 lb coming down on whoever's feet might be around we found just a little bit of shrink wrap best way to get it done this is where the spring trip Edge gets set and this guy makes this job looks really easy but Arctic uses a combination of both a spring trip Edge and the entire mle board can move up and over obstacles together you want to do that again say I said he makes it look easy it's incredibly smooth dude if we were trying to do that in the field I was thinking that do you know how many hours and frustration and cussing and and Pedro just like boom boom boom boom he would be like so frustrated watching guys like us try to do it out in the field all right we're off to the powder [Music] so what is that considered deuring or dagging or what do they call that what you're doing be slagging be slagging okay that's what [Music] they [Music] okay next yeah it gets hung yes it's then to gets shot blasted yep right there yep so it's got BBS that shoot it to clean yeah yeah so we're actually throwing little metal VB there's 8 20 horsepower wheels on there so each of those yellow things it's a 20 horsepower electric motor there's eight of them and all they're doing is throwing these little metal BBs at the steel to clean it off and then it gets washed yep then it gets dried yeah get all the water off then it gets painted powder coated yeah powder coated and then it gets paint yep all right we got it we can't go into the washer now we can't go into the dryer but let's go see how they powder coting y all [Music] right now this metal is actually hot at this point and I don't want to touch it cuz I don't want the oils from my skin on that right exactly right so when these go through our washer they get fully degased and then they all also get a chemical pre-treatment put on top helps with brust prevention helps the paint the powder stick to it but that's exactly right so this is a chemically treated surface now that's about to go into the powder coat Booth get the powder sprayed on [Music] all right so we're over at What's called the powder kitchen for the powder moood in this bin right here is the the raw material it's the powder coat itself that we paint on S is actually powder yes it's actually powder what's happening here we're pumping air it's the bottom of this bin right here it's called fluidizing so you'll actually be able to see it's moving around like water like a liquid almost it's it's drying it's it's a louder right but it's powder and that's what lets this Pulpit for these hoses P out the G and that's recycling materal yep so this the he recap is everything that doesn't get adhere to the material yep it gets reused right here okay so it goes directly from Powder Coating right into the oven and that oven baked it at what temp 450° and we've got this array of ir infrared heaters that'll actually warm up the part and gel the powerder coat before it goes in the oven to help Kickstart that curing process and it takes a bit to do it so you got to have a long run so this whole thing is a giant oven yep yeah this whole big Hors Sho structure is a giant oven and it once it comes out of the oven see down in there once it comes out these fans instantly start to cool it and then this is a cooling chamber here too right yes this is a cooling chamber this whole thing heign to cool off the park y okay Nick what station is this we're at now so we're at the frame tacking station so we've got this giant frame fixture here that does our full range of light duty snow plows from the 6t all the way up to the 15 1/2 ft light duty snow plow okay so frame tacking so you take tubular steel yep in its raw form yep and then you actually create the frame for the plow right here on one one spot right here we tack everything together we weld the hard to get two areas and then we send it over to the frame all right guys let's go for a ride we're going to load up a big fat piece of sheet metal on the under the the blah blah blah arm [Music] now this now this will get cut yep into all of the parts for the mle boards for the side wings for everything yeah mboard side frame everything yep we run all sorts of thicknesses on this machine from 16 gauge all the way up to 1 hey wait what was that Simon we got our flat bar the same place when ours get to Lumber drink so you do the the Big G of the whole assembly right in this one spot yeah you guys we are on to the next station but this machine Cuts all of your plats off yep but it does something pretty cool yeah so this machine is our fiber laser cutter this machine uses a laser beam as well as nitrogen gas to cut the parts the cool part is we're making the nitrogen gas here ourselves out of thin air yep air is 78% nitrogen and we're pulling it out with these babies and pump it in the machine okay so you're not making you're not importing nitrogen you're creating it out of the atmosphere with this yep yep this all this is is tubes filled with burnt coconut shells you pump them with pressurized compress air from a shop air compressor let it sit for a short amount of time and when you drain these out you get pure nitrogen and the rest of the byproducts get exhausted burnt coconut sh yep that's all it is all right you also make your own welding gas here yes we do yep we mix carbon dioxide and argon we've got a gas mixing system right here we've got big holding tanks outside and all of this lets us control the materials coming in and the welding process that makes the sectional soflow all right and we're going to go inside of the machine now with Brandon and I I was giving him crap cuz I said does all your buddies say hey let's go Brandon yes absolutely they do and uh we're going to see how this goes now you said this machine Brandon is so violent that if you were in it when this is operating if it hit you it would eject you all the way into the parking lot oh yeah oh yeah it's pretty fast pretty fast all right well let's crawl inside and see what Brandon's talking about [Music] Nick what does this machine do here all right so this machine is our bulk CNC saw so not only does the machine have CNC capability it clamps the material it moves it forward it's keeping track at the length but it lets us cut as many bundles of tube as we can fit in this clamp at once so we can cut enough tube for 10 frames in one this is a giant drill press that the drill press goes to the metal yep and you don't bring the metal to the drill press right we got 75 ft of table here so we can set up as many frame tubes as we can fit in 75 ft hit the start button on this thing it'll go for an hour finish all the parts or pull them off reset it [Music] okay so what's going to happen at this stage now we've got everything yep so we've got the Fram fully tacked together ready to go on the welding robot so it's going to come and do the same thing it's going to look for the seams going to check seam tracking and then both of these robots are going to feed out this Frame they'll get the whole frame welded in about 10 [Music] minutes [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right let's take a look at the wels the robot did right Dave this is all done by robot yes [Music] sir hey we're do going to assembly final assembly so we've got all the all the components done wrapped up this will go through the main process that we've already seen and we'll put it all back all together all right let's go there next so this is final assembly all the finished components go together to create the final snow plow that you guys will see in a just a moment Gra there one together why he recording all right how so how many of these do they normally assemble at the same time uh we assemble about six at the same time depending on the sizes uh 6 to 9 at a time and your name is Adonis and what do you do for these guys ad uh we assemble we just assembly but what do you do uh I just managed to assembly I well I heard you R yeah I heard you manag the entire final assembly and final assembly the shipping it out the door getting it loaded on the truck make sure everything get out good and every customer get satisfied and you had up the entire operation yes sir that's I'm head to finish y yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] the question I have for you guys is where did you guys start with the manufacturing process I mean cuz you're a Service Company you guys didn't inherit a factory you had to figure out how to do this what were your roots where did you come from well it started off um when my father before we were selling the plows just making them for our own Fleet uh one man in a garage that turned into a couple guys making you know 40 50 plows a year then we started selling them and then we went and got this facility leased it and built it in the factory is today through different stages and it's been the same guy uh Jeff sexon who started with my dad 20 years ago till last week which was his 20th anniversary building this Factory from the ground up so you guys had to figure it out right from scratch it's not like you inherited from scratch inherited yeah because 20 years years ago a factory didn't exist exactly how many people you got working here now in this facility about 60 yeah about 60 just building snow plows another 1,500 out in the field plowing snow still to this day during the winter yeah and about 25 people at our service facility up north all right well I just want to say thank you for letting me come in and invade your space seeing how we get how you guys build a a plow from scratch to finish in under 3 hours so much appreciated thank you thank you sir than you guys this is Lucas one of the owners Blake another owner Nick one of the engineers and we are not done yet because you got to see how the plow got done but now I'm going to actually whip you through this Factory real fast and outside because there's more actually to this and they have a second facility too that we didn't even go to but we will go to down the road the runway the runway famous mile of equipment oh the runway is the coolest thing it's a mile right of just equipment all of their equipment lined up getting ready to go out to the various Lots in the season you only do it once a year twice a year once in the fall and once in the spring right and I'm coming back for that so if that's something you guys want to see you got to tell me in the comments down below show me take me to the runway but let's go do let's you know what let's hop on these boys are always on these things right here let's hop on these good old fashioned drag race and let's go check out the rest of the [Music] facility [Music] all right you guys well I hope you enjoyed today's video I sure was awesome to be able to come through here and see how if they get these things done so fast and so well but that's all I got for you on this one I hope uh whatever you're working out turn working on turns out awesome you guys and uh have a great week have a great month have a great year and a great season that's it for this one God bless go get them you guys catch you guys on another