September 6, 2006 - Kohler Tour

On Wednesday, September 7, we drove to the town of Kohler, WI. (Kohler makes toilets, sinks, tubs, faucets as well as generators and engines.) Mr. Kohler originally manufactured farm implements in a town east of Kohler. In the late 1800's he took a watering trough (aka "hog scalding trough") and enameled the inside of it and put it on sale as a "tub that can be used for bathing inside the house". It was a very popular item and business increased. He decided that the town they were in was getting too congested and wanted to move the plant west. In 1899 the new plant was started, but it burned down and was rebuilt. In 1900 Mr. Kohler died. His two partners were not able to run the business so Mr. Kohler's three sons bought them out. They finished building the plant and one of the brothers died in 1904. Then another brother died in 1905. (They never told us what these brothers or the father died from but I'd really be interested in knowing...) The final brother took over running the business. Houses for the workers had been built up around the factory but there was no plan to the development of the area. Mr. Kohler hired a planner and toured Europe looking at planned developments. They came back to Kohler and decided that the houses would be built on wide tree-lined streets near the factory but with the factory completely hidden from sight in order to be aesthetically pleasing but not far from work. He had a huge brick residence built to house all of the immigrant workers and called it the American Club. The men paid for room and board out of their pay but the rates were very inexpensive. When the men were not working they were provided with lots of recreation activities as well as tutoring so that they could become US citizens. The current president, Herb Kohler, has decided that Kohler will have a newer, BOLD look and has made some real changes in the way bathrooms are designed. You have probably seen some of the Kohler ads on TV. Another member of the family (maybe a sister) is very interested in The Arts and supervises an Art Institue that Kohler supports. (Each year 16-22 artists are invited to come to the Kohler plant and use its facilities to complete a project of their choosing. The only stipulation is that one of each of the items they create must be left on the Kohler grounds and one must go on display in the Art Institute. From what we saw of the finished projects, Abby and Rachel have done better projects in grade school!) Kohler is a privately held corporation so they have no public shareholders to hold them accountable for what they do. (Good thing...) Herb Kohler decided in the 1990's to turn the old American Club into a five-diamond hotel with appropriate ammenities. There are 4 large, well respected golf courses in the immediate area. Lots of people thought that he had lost his mind doing something like this in the middle of nowhere but apparently it has worked and the Hotel is full all of the time. People come just to be pampered and enjoy the five-diamond luxury.

The tour was first class: a 9 1/2 on a scale of 1 to 10. First we saw the forms for the clay toilets and sinks and how the forms are removed from the poured products. In the brass foundry area we saw how a sand mold is made to be placed INSIDE of the form for the item to be molded so that the hollow areas stay hollow when the VERY hot liquid brass is poured or ladled into the form. For a faucet, for example, a sand form is made for anyplace the water is going to flow. That is put into the mold for the brass, the mold is closed, the brass is poured in. It flows everywhere except where the sand mold is (up, down, all around). After about 30 seconds the mold is spread open and the molded faucet is removed. The sand mold is then disintegrated and washed out of the product. Then it is sent along the line to be cleaned up, shined up, plated, tested and shipped out. We saw a HUGE machine that automatically sets the form, set the sand mold, puts the top of the mold on, pours in the molten cast iron, cools the mold, removes the mold and sends the tub on to the next step. Mr. Kohler knew he wanted a machine to do this process, but he couldn't find one anywhere. Finally he met a man who said he had such a machine but he couldn't get it to work. Mr. Kohler told him that he had so many engineers on the payroll that if the man would sell him the machine HE would get it to work. He did, they did, and they are using it today.

The BEST part of the tour was watching the robots enamel a bathtub. The enamel goes onto the tub in a powdered form and the tub (or any other item) must be 1750 degrees for proper enameling. From a HUGE furnace, a robot arm lifts an ORANGE HOT bathtub out and moves it over so that another robot arm sifts the powdered enamel on it. The furnace robot turns the tub this way and that so that the enamel robot can get every section adequately covered. However, since this takes a few minutes the tub starts to cool down. It is moved into the furnace again until it is again 1750 degrees and then the process is repeated for a second coat. This time the robot moves the tub onto a conveyor belt that takes it through a cooling section for about 5 hours. It was just incredible to see the ORANGE hot tubs. One lady asked why they painted the tubs orange first. It REALLY did look like that!

We saw the men doing the same thing with tubs and sinks. The automatic machines do the 3 most popular colors and styles of tubs - White, Almond and Bisque. If another color is ordered or a style that is not popular, the men do this process in a different section of the plant. As we walked around we were told not to touch any of the finished products. You could feel the heat coming off of them from about 10 feet away. I can't believe they actually let us walk around there.

It was a GREAT tour!

After lunch we went to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc. They have the submarine Cobia there and we toured it. The museum was very well done and again Mark got some ideas for the Port Aransas museum.