INSIDE Holley's Carburetor Factory and Its Epic History! (Things You NEVER Knew)

A lot of people don't know Holly started out making cars. So, their pressure sensor is in that cutting head. Yeah. 426 Chrysler. Pull it and bend it. Like I said, that little slinky thing is inside that tube. Logan's discovered the Holly spark plugs. That's my long-term goal in life is to have a Holly museum. So, we are standing at the Holly World headquarters in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and we're about to go into the building where they've been making carburetors since 1952. I'm here with Shane Wagggerly, who's the unofficial historian of this place. So, I've been here about 22 years. So, I know a fair amount about Holly and all the parts that are made here and a lot of our history. So, it's pretty cool story and I'm proud to be associated with it. Let's check it out. All right. See how this magic happens. So, the first thing we're going to see here is the CNC machines and machine some of our carburetor throttle bodies and main body. These uh machines take a raw casting and machine them into a finished throttle base plate that is used on the carburetor production line. Several different machines that do that. How were these things machined in the '60s '7s ' 80s before they had CNC's. So before they had CNC's all of these would have been machined on manual machines. Uh they were called Kingsberries and they were a rotary turret machine. put one in and it would drill it one station and it moved to the next station, the next station and all the way around. Each station did a different operation, but it would, you know, it was actually as fast as a CNC machine, but it was dedicated and it would only do one carburetor in one style, one configuration. So, interesting. Definitely much more flexible machining operations with the CNC. This is one of the coolest machines that I've ever seen. It is cool with the robotic motor and everything. Basically, they load the machine up, you know, several times a day and it runs unattended all by itself. It does. Yeah. The cutting head also holds the the tip to probe the measurement also. That's that's crazy. So there pressure sensors in that cutting head. Yes. It measures the load on the spindle, uh RPM, fuel and flow, everything. Wow. And it's changing tools like rapid fire. Yep. No. Yeah, this is definitely this is probably the coolest CNC machine I we've ever seen operate. And we've seen a lot of machines do a lot of things. What do you say? That's freaking cool. You've been making carburetors as long as we have. You figure out how to do it right. The next area we're going to go to is where they start. They also machine more of these uh carburetor components as they head towards the assembly line. So, this machine machines the metering blocks, which is kind of the brain of the carburetor. This one would have just come off of the machine. This has all the internal passages. Hasn't been cleaned or deburred yet. Uh, but it'll also get anodized once it's done. So, it has a protective finish. Is that where the jets go? The jets go right in here. Car valve would be in here from this side. These are all your emulsion bleeds here. Pretty cool stuff. So this is for those who don't know there's where the center part of the carb is. These go on either side of that where the rectangles are. Correct. Make your screws go in these holes. So that's pretty cool. Yep. What are all these bars right here for? So this is the Earl's machining department. This is where we make all of the uh Earl's fittings. The small braided hose adapters fittings uh and fitting ends. Starts out with bar stock. Uh, the bar stock all is either hex or round and then they put it into these bar feeder machines for these CNC screw machines. I did not know that that happened in the same place as all this other stuff. That's crazy. So, these are fitting nuts. It just takes the hextock. The hextock has the Earl's name marked on it before it's machined. And they're all machined. They'll go through a production quality control audit. Then they'll go out for anodizing, brazing, assembly, those types of operations. So these are making screws basically. So it's making those from a piece of bar stock turning them out. This is our made poly techch system. Essentially, it has six CNC machines that are connected by this trolley system. The trolley system, somebody is running, one person is running all six of these CNC machines. They're now at the other end loading part on the trolley. The trolley comes down, knows which machine needs to be loaded, loads that machine, pulls the other part machine out, takes it back down, and deposits at the other end. And it just does that all day long. One person run six machine. Very efficient. We've never seen anything like this before either. Pretty unusual machine. That's pretty crazy. We make a lot of our uh carburetor parts, NASCAR throttle bodies are made in this area. So the parts come in from down here where uh you saw the machining operation. They work their way down and then they step across into the production area. So this is actually the assembly area. Different lines assemble different parts. One assembles throttle body, one assembles the front fuel bowl, one assembles the rear fuel bowl, one assembles the choke. Those all feed down into the main assembly line, which then puts all of those subcomponents together into the complete carburetor where it hits the end of the line and gets tested. You have the sniper kits that look like carburetors, but they're fuel injection. Are there any parts that are shared in both where they go through a certain point together and then they branch off to get machined a different way? There are subcomponents that are the same. So things like throttle butterflies would potentially be the same, throttle levers, some shafts would be similar, but probably not quite the same. Uh and then at that point, they both kind of diverge into their own products, but some of those parts do interchange. That's pretty cool. Yep. Now we're entering the main assembly line. We had the sub line, so we're feeding into the main assembly line. Uh it is towards the end of the day, so they're probably cycling through finishing up some builds. But this is where the main body would start into the process, work its way down and through and then out the backside. This is the Hillbornne business unit. Um one of the gentlemen that working work in here is Don Enriquez. Don has been with Hillbornne. We'll have to ask him how long he's been with Hillbornne. So how you doing today, Don? Good. Yourself? Good. Good team. This is Mitchell and Logan. How you do? Nice to meet you. So, we were uh just admiring the the Hillbornne business unit, and I told him that uh there probably wasn't a man on earth that knew more about it than you. How long have you been with Hillbornne? 60 years. 60 years. So, Don uh Don is also an avid drag racer. Um if I'm not mistaken, he won March Meet this year. He won the March Meet and the uh well, last year was March Meet Hot Rod. Okay. And uh Junior Fuels. So dieh hardcore drag racer. Uh still puts the hurt on the young guys every chance he gets. And uh quite the uh quite the knowledgeable individual. So we're really happy to have Don with the company. He uh he worked with Steuart Hillbornne for decades I imagine. And we're reintroducing a lot of the Hillbborne stuff. Um got the big block uh stack injectors out now. We're going to continue to work through more of the other new products as we go along. This one is 426 Chrysler. This is small block Chevrolet. That's big block. This is for the blowers. But they're not going to keep this one going. All the electronics are inside. Huh. Two rail. These things are so cool. So you got like your own little Hillborn section in here, dude. This right here. The Hillborn Center of Excellence, we'll call it. Thank you, Nice meeting you. Appreciate it. Nice meeting you. Where are we at now? We are now in the engineering development lab. Uh this is where a lot of the fun and a lot of the magic happens. Uh this is where we do all of our fit test. This is where we do a lot of the R&D, a lot of the development, uh, a lot of the initial prototype construction, um, you know, durability testing, dyno testing, those types of things. So, for example, this, uh, Mustang, uh, actually belongs to our CEO. Uh, we've got retro bright headlights that we've fitted into it. These are LED upgrade headlights that we make. Uh, really a cool piece. Substantially improves the visibility at night uh, over a standard seal beam headlight. So, we'll put them in all types of different cars, make sure they fit the original buckets, plug and play like they're supposed to, and it's just part of our development process. But, uh, we've got a lot of different things in here. We've got, you know, stuff where we're fit testing, um, uh, restoration trim, uh, bumpers, for instance, those kind of things in our Holly Classic Trucks line. Uh, we've got this square body that we're working on now. uh looks like it's getting a full build with Detroit Speed Suspension, Classic Instruments, you know, Hooker uh engine swap, uh components, and and probably getting an LS swap in that one or an LT swap. Um we've got an alignment rack in the back here for a lot of our suspension work and those types of things. Um got a couple of projects over here. We're working on some new engine swap applications that'll be coming up. So, a little bit of everything back here. That that truck was at the Ford Fest out there. Ford Fest. Yeah, I remember those little orange wheels. We can go over and check out see what that was in the booth. Check out see what they've got in it at the moment. I see a set of headers over there that are all pieced together. Are those like prototype headers? They are certainly. We can go back and look at them. So, this one's got an EcoBoost in it. Um, this is one that that uh we're building prototype motor mounts and everything in and uh they probably had it at Ford Fest to kind of gauge interest and see how many people would be interested in doing an EcoBoost swap. But they're killer little motors. They fit really nice and uh you know they make good power. So should be an exciting platform for us. That's cool. Yeah, the header prototyping process is something that interests me personally cuz a lot of you guys know that I make headers as an example. That would be a prototype header. Um, we make prototypes a lot of different ways. We can laser scan the vehicle uh and you know build them all in CAD, bend up the pieces or we do it the oldfashioned way depending on the application and uh just start piecing them together with you know uh mandrobent tubes and collectors and then we uh ultimately end up building a fixture off of it to develop the production parts. So you have somebody just kind of make the primaries the old school way and then you could turn that into a CNC bent singular piece correct like that you'll see on the shelf. That's correct. Yep. So, but that's where it all starts. That's pretty cool. Yep. Is there like one dude who does that who's the header guy? There are multiple people we have on staff that do it. We've got a pretty good team of people that uh have done it for a number of years and are pretty good at it at this point. So, that's pretty cool cuz that's not easy to do. It is not easy to do. I I've built a couple of header things in my life and and it is tedious and uh takes a long time. So, I'm glad you said that. Some people just don't understand. No, it uh you know, it's it's pretty easy to make one tube. It's not too bad to make two tubes, but then when you have to start squeezing the third and the fourth tube in, it gets really complicated cuz this one's in the way and I didn't think about this one. You're like, "Dang, how am I going to fit this in the car now?" Exactly. So, it's like, "Nope, throw that tube out and let's start over again." Uh, now I'm going to go this way or that way. So, yeah, computers definitely help from that standpoint. Uh, the scanning technology that's available today uh is really helpful. Do you guys uh make some of the Scott Drake stuff here? Um not at this facility. Uh we've got another facility here in town that does some assembly of the Scott Drake stuff. Uh it'll be over near the warehouse where we're going a little later. You got like the whole platter going on here. One of everything. It's like smorgus board of engines. Yeah. These are a lot of our development engines that we do testing and development on. Uh some of them are just blocks like this one uh that we would do for fit up in a vehicle. Some of them are actually running engines where uh you know we can do EFI training on them, we can test sensors, we test ECUs, that type of thing, but uh we try to keep a a wide variety just so we have the ability to, you know, test things anytime we need to. Do we hear some injector testing going on over there? There is some uh injector testing over there, but I can't show you that. Oh, there's there's a lot of secret stuff in here. We can't see. A lot of secret stuff. There lot of R&D going on in here. A lot more than one would expect. That's right. It's pretty cool. Lots of fun things. Got coyotes and Godzillaas and a little bit of everything laying around. There's a blueprint engine. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. We have a video inside the blueprint factory. If you like factory stuff, you should go watch that one, too. This highlights a lot of our history of our brands. Uh we've got 70 brands uh 70 plus brands now as part of the Holly family and we're always looking for ways to preserve the history for the brands. Uh we don't want to lose that heritage. Uh it means a lot to each of us that work here. It means a lot to the people that built these brands and u it influences the products that we make going forward. So, you can see in here we've got some vintage Mallerie stuff uh back in the days when you had really cool old vintage packaging uh when they made their big high-fire ignition systems. Got some early prototypes in here. Uh that is Protock throttle body number one. Uh when they converted to EFI, we set those types of things back. Some preliminary uh examples of our uh Terminator fuel injection. uh some of our throttle body, Sniper EFI, which is our current uh you know, bestselling product at this point, and then uh some rapid prototypes of other stuff that we've done over the years. When you're making packaging for things, do you ever draw inspiration from these old ones? We do. It really depends on the product. Uh if we're doing a nostalgia product, we want a nostalgia packaging with it. Um, if it's a new state-of-the-art product, then, you know, certainly it it needs a different, you know, feel and look, but, uh, absolutely. I I collect vintage packaging just because I I think it's really cool. So, so if it were up to you, everything would come in a cool like a lot of it would for sure. A lot of it would for sure. So, I have a very old Soul. Uh, but a lot of carburetor stuff. Uh, this was a giant 2000 CFM TBI unit that never went into production. The one with the red metering box there is a Barry Grant fuel injection from the very early days when uh he was developing his own EFI. Um is that just like electronic blocks bolted onto a carburetor? It basically is uh it sprayed through the boosters and overall um the mechanical part wasn't bad. The uh the EFI electronics just wasn't there yet and uh so he was not up to speed on that. Um, you know, Excel has done a lot of things over the years. A lot of cool products. Um, you know, ignition related, testing equipment related. Um, you know, certainly one of our bigger, better brands, famous brands like NOS, Fast and Furious, uh, certainly has a a large following, legacy brand, uh, that, uh, has, you know, incredible past associated with it. Um, you know, even some vintage stuff like an electronic carburetor uh that was that came out during the gas crunch. Um, you know, the 70s uh was a major gas crunch period and uh everybody was looking for ways to save fuel. So, we try to keep that type of stuff around. Um, it's just part of our history and part of our heritage. What's in the wooden box? Glad you asked. Like this is buried treasure right here. It is the uh I wish I knew more about the history of it, but uh this is actually a Mallalerie branded product. Oh wow. Um I believe this was a test unit for that has dual points on it. Has dual capacitors on it. And I think this was a way that you could check uh spark using a coil. So you could plug a coil into it. You could plug your leads onto it. And I think this was a way for you to actually be able to test the coil uh in the field. But, uh, I do not know what date it is. I've tried to get more information on it, but I don't have, uh, that information at this point. So, it looks like Thomas Edison made this thing or something. I'm guessing it's probably from the 30s to the '50s. Uh, dual points, I think, came out probably became popular in the '50s. So, I would say it's probably from the ' 50s through the the 60s, but I don't know that for a fact. We uh we were talking about, you know, building headers a little bit ago and here's an example of something we uh did some experimenting with a few years ago. There's a complete rapid prototype printed header. Wow. So, designed it all in CAD, printed it all out in 3D and uh you know would allow you to fit it in the vehicle, make sure everything was exactly where you wanted before you tweaked it and put it into production. So, I think it's so cool. How you doing, Jim? how these look like a carburetor. Like we have a sniper on the blueprint big block. People like, "Oh, why are you putting a carburetor on that?" Like, it's not. One, there's nothing wrong with carburetors. Two. It's just not one. Well, it's uh, you know, everybody has a different different opinion. Some people want their EFI motor to look different than their original, you know, carbureted motor like an LS does. Some people want their carbureted engine to look just or their EFI engine to look just like their carbureted engine. So, just depends on what people are looking for. Old school is like way cooler. Yep. This was a product we did a few years ago called the HydroMat. Uh this is basically like a giant sponge that sucks up the fuel. Holds it inside and then basically allows it to be transferred up to the fuel pump uh and to the engine without any air bubbles in it and it will literally suck this reservoir completely dry. Uh, so if you're using an off-road application or a hard cornering application, the fuel's slloshing all over and you just have a tube sticking down in the middle of it, it won't pick it up. But with this, any fuel that hits this mat gets absorbed into it, gets filtered out, and gets drawn right up in. I think that'd be really beneficial to have. Yeah, that's really cool. That's really cool. So, this would be back in the days when you were making a new intake manifold, you would make a mahogany wooden pattern. Uh, the you actually had a pattern maker that would make this. It would set in the core boxes. And this would actually make the finished cast aluminum part. Uh so all of your all of your patterns were wood back in the old days. Okay. So yeah, Lee Homeman had some of these like for valve covers and stuff. Yeah. It's a little bit oversized, doesn't it? Yes. Yeah. They make it they have to factor in all the shrinkage of the the casting and stuff, but yes, uh they make them just a little bit different than the finished good size. So that's a rapid prototype of our stealth ram intake manifold. So um isn't this what's on the Escalade? Yeah. Next bunch of stuff I've got together here is some historical artifacts from the company. Uh, as we talked earlier, you know, history is a big part of Holly and all the companies that that we own. Uh, there's a whole bunch of us here that really respect the the…