Asia Factory tour 2019, a visit to the BBT Silver Weld Through sheetmetal factories…

As I needed to visit some factories in Taiwan I came to the idea to invite some journalists along this trip. This way we all can learn what’s all about to develop tooling and die’s… Also why it takes sometimes a longer time before we finnish certain parts in the by us desired quality  before we bring them to the public market.

We start in the factory where they make the tooling for the deep troth pressing body parts.

The first  stop is the place where they “mold” in the original part into plaster… this is a very important part of the reversed engineering process, it makes the part perfect for digitizing. This digital dimensions will help later on to mill the casted tooling…

From that plaster mould, after digitizing, they make a styrofoam set of “tooling”… that set contains three different tools, a male, a female and the drophead tool… the styrofoam is needed for the casting. The casting happens in the foundry, we will visit the foundry later in the week.

We had a proper banner moment in all factories we visited, and every factory received their proper banner… the group of factories all belong to one owner, its many factories all working together.

When the moulds  come back from casting they need to be milled in perfect dimensions, these dimensions come from the digitizing from the plaster tool…

Pretty complicated tooling!

and big machines!

Hot VW’s Shin in full working mode… he made tons of film, pictures and video, some of them went already viral on the social network media and had mega hits! …:)

Time for lunch…:)

Streets in Taiwan are very colorful!

After milling the tooling have to be all finished and polished by hand, an extra intensive and  time consuming hand job!

as You can see some tooling are very large for a rather small part! They’re all cast Iron… Weight is tons!

After pressing, the parts been cut out by laser from the too large base plate, also the laser makes all small holes etc… very precise, all CNC…

All parts have a die to set up the laser, so the laser knows where to cut exactly. These are the master models to laser the BBT bus engine lids…

…. and this is the pressing of the engine lids… very heavy tool on a 600 ton press!

Outside of the factory they store tools and jigs, to assemble all parts…

In total the factory group makes over 8000 part numbers, and every part exist out of several parts, and every part from a part number has its own tooling….that’s a lot of tooling…:) 🙂

Rear parcel tray of the bus development, Camper and Commercial journalist Andy is learning a lot here!

Hot VW’s Shin takes pictures of the first hit of the Bus cab floor plates.

Some parts needs heavy assembling, here the assembly of the complete sides for American muscle cars.

Airmighty Niels @ work… journalists from magazines take their jobs really professional! Wowh!

Several smaller presses do the smaller restrike pressing, or stamping small parts… machines are everywhere!! After the first hit all further pressing steps been called a “restrike”…

Cab floor plates are almost ready, need two more restrikes!

Banner moments always been a cool moment during this trip to see the journalists at work! All factories are very happy with their banners too!

Here we shake hands with Kevin, our direct contact from the group, the plant manager and yours truly. This plant makes the most bus parts for us.

Rear bus corners ready to ship…. to Belgium…:)

The complete chassis is finished now… and first assembled parts are on the way, however we might assemble the chassis in Europe in the future… to save on shipping costs,

What a day!! Crazy, just crazy, too much to handle almost… and the best parts still has to come, so stay tuned!

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