hammerhead_corvette
Senior Member
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- Jun 1, 2017
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I love that you post this kind of stuff. I have been trying to mostly American made products and this helps remind me why I chose make it a priority in my life.Our first factory visit was in the High Point, NC area, which is known for furniture. We were visiting a hosiery mill, which was a new manufacturing partner for us and our first ever meet and greet. It kinda blew us away, it was the biggest and most advanced hosiery mill I've ever been in. They have 1000 machines and over 350 people work there. They knit for some huge companies (e.g. Walmart sized folks) and had the latest machinery. They also had some really really smart people working there, mechanics and engineers who created their custom machinery. The management team and the owner showed us around. One thing that struck me was how management knew every line worker. Everyone was working hard but there was a real team / family business mentality. Maybe the only bummer about the entire visit was they had so much custom machinery that we were not allowed to take any pictures of hardly anything.
I did press for several pics. this is Chad, the chief mechanic. he has been working in mills since he was 16, he told me. He had a pretty cool shop coat on with weird hosiery tools sticking out of the pockets. his bottom pockets were so ripped up that he had stapled them back together with these crazy big metal staples. Chad is a bit of a mechanical wizard and had a bunch of custom machines and equipment that he built in use at the mill. Most recently he machined and welded custom racks that were then copied at scale for the entire mill so they could feed yarn to the machines more efficiently.
for a hosiery mill, this place was spotless, no mess or dirt was found anywhere. there was a real sense of pride in the work and they were fanatical about quality. They make a military-spec wool sock on double cylinder true rib machines that we are going to make our own version of. It has a compression band and cushioned foot but isn't too thick. It's pretty badass, so stay turned for that.
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I was allowed to take one photos of some of the management and sales team (and Chad the mechanic) on the knitting floor. You can at least get a small feel for the size of this place. this was one of three gigantic buildings we toured, of which the complex had 5 such buildings, so we didn't even see it all. Some of these folks have been in hosiery all of their lives and even came to work at the mill via family members that were there before them.
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