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Bridgestone: The Process Of Building A Tire

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Building a tire from scratch is a very intricate and delicate process. The process of building a tire from scratch involves great detail and can be easily botched if anything goes wrong during the process. Building a tire correctly is very important because billions of people rely on tires to get them to work, school, and various other places they need to go on a daily basis. Furthermore, it is imperative that a tire be built correctly; because the safety of many people could be compromised if it is done wrong. I learned about all of the repercussions of producing an incorrectly made tire when I worked at Bridgestone. There, I also learned all of the ins and outs of building a tire, including, materials, training, and all of the steps needed …show more content…

Machines used for different processes are all different and take years to master. All of the process start off with the raw material of rubber. The rubber has to be mixed to the right consistency in a giant mixing machine before it can be used in any of the processes. Then, all the rubber gets sent on pallets to the next set of processes to make all of the different parts of the tire. The different machines that you might have to run are a bead winder machine, where the bead of a tire is made, an inner liner machine, where the most inner part of the tire is made, a body ply machine, where the outer part of the inner layer of the tire is made, and a stabilizer ply machine, where wire is coated in rubber at a specific gauge to make the steel belt of the tire is made. The most important thing you need to make all of the parts of the tire are the actual machines themselves. The three main materials for most of the processes are fabric, steel wire, and rubber. After all of the separate processes are completed they get sent to a TAM machine. This machine combines all of the other processes together to form a tire. This process contains all of the separate products, lube, rubber, glue, and air. The TAM machine combines everything together with glue and other rubbers; after that, the machine over inflates the tire to check for any leaks or anything that may be defective. Then, the tire carcass gets sent to a finishing line. On this finishing line the tread gets added by a tire press. The tire press gets the tire heated to over 2,000 degrees and then quickly cooled. This is to make sure the tread gets added properly and securely. Finally, the finished tire gets sent to inspection. Here, it is very carefully inspected, and any defected tires are discarded before the rest are shipped off to the customers. Production workers are also essentially a “material” needed to successfully build a tire.

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