In the first part of this series, found here, we looked at a factory in Southeast China that makes sunglasses. This time we'll look at a factory in the same area that makes pool floats. For some background, look at the link above to pt.1.
I went to this factory looking for a custom water bladder type component for a project I'm working on. Imagine my surprise when I walk in and it's filled with pool floats shaped like pizzas, doughnuts, giant dinosaurs and other wacky stuff. Nothing pornographic, perverts.
I wasn't allowed to take a lot of pictures for intellectual property reasons, they wouldn't want evil corporate rivals to get their hands on the secret pool float formulas(what?) anyway, here's what I got with some description:
This place was a pretty big. A big factory with multiple floors of balloon making and testing. There's a good chance some of you, my thousands of readers, have relaxed with a cocktail on one of the floats from this factory.
First, they take big rolls of vinyl sheet and cut smaller pieces that can go to be die-cut into the right shape.
There is no adhesive used for these, all they do is put a big, hot tool in a press, usually made from brass for heat transfer purposes, and then press down, melting the joints together between the two pieces of vinyl.
Above, and example of a heat welding tool to seal the pieces of vinyl. Dirty brass.
The small machines like the below worker is sitting at, the machines that are everywhere and taking up a lot of the factory floor, are smaller heat presses used to make smaller hard to reach features and some more complicated geometry on the floats. Floats like up in the top pic, the green on that has a funky shape.
Here are some pictures of factory and stacks of floats. Unfortunately I couldn't take pictures where they were blowing them up. They had huge rooms where they blew up every single float before shipping, 100%!
Well, that's about it, hope you enjoyed. If you have any manufacturing questions, please ask away in the comments.
