Sometimes You Just Get Lucky

Back in 2019 we were headed down Interstate 5 through Washington and into Oregon, headed South towards destinations unknown, when we heard back from our friend Andy at Warn Industries…. “Hey Tim, we can squeeze in some time to give you a factory tour if you can stop in on your way south.”

A millisecond later we hit the turn signal, worked our way over to the next off-ramp and headed for Clackamas, Oregon, the home of Warn Industries and where Andy Lilienthal works in the marketing department.

Founded in 1948, Warn Industries is one of those granddaddy 4×4 companies, having been around since the little Willys Flat Fenders were repurposed after WWII for farm and recreation use. Warn Industries has not only seen the 4×4 market grow and evolve, they grew and evolved too, from their humble beginnings as a small family ran business to its current site in Oregon that is 180,000 sq.ft. and employing over 350 people.

First step was through the Warn lobby

We met up with our guide Andy, got our guest ID badges (yes, we needed badges!) and headed deeper into the factory.

One of the first sights you see in the lobby at Warn is this beautiful 1948 Willys CJ-2A. It’s absolutely gorgeous and of course it has an old school Warn winch on the front.

 

 

Taking a closer look at the front of that incredible Willys, we see it is a Warn Bellevue 6,000lb. winch; the older sibling to all the Warn winches that followed.

 

 

Another display in the main lobby that gets the Northridge4x4 nod of approval is this Zeon 10-S display with a JK grill.

 

 

Walking through the Warn offices you find all sorts of cool history, like these vintage ads for Warn locking hubs. It was obvious that Warn Industries takes pride in their history in the 4×4 world and uses it to help set the tone to help drive them them forward to build the best 4×4 products you can find.

 

The winch side of the Warn factory:

You know you are in winch heaven when this is the first thing you see walking out into the factory. Bins full of winch drums spooled with wire rope! Oh, yeah, let’s get this tour going!

 

 

Next up was a pallet of the Warn 8274-70 winches. These buggers were an upgraded, limited edition version of the 8274 with a 6hp motor rated to 10,000lbs. pull. Only 999 were built, many of them were sold right here on Northridge4x4!

 

 

As we continued on, we passed this bin of Warn locking hub bodies. It was not hub assembly day, so no cool pics of them going together. However it was still awesome to see iconic pieces like these waiting for assembly.

 

 

As we walked deeper into the factory we passed by this sweet vintage piece of CNC machinery, a Wickman multi-spindle lathe that is decades old. Warn Industries has kept this piece of equipment in tip-top shape, slowly upgrading it over the years with newer controls. It works so good for what it does, they doubt a new machine could do any better and highly doubt one would last as many years as this old girl has.

Warn… still building parts in America:

Many of the winches you see on the market these days are built off-shore. One thing we like about Warn is their commitment to bring quality components to the off road community that are manufactured and assembled in the USA… Clackamas, Oregon to be specific. Not all of Warn parts are built here in the states, but we’ve got to commend them for building what they can in this global manufacturing world.

As we turned the corner we spied a couple bins of gear blanks in-between processes. These have been turned to size and awaiting their turn on the tooth cutting machine.

 

 

Not too much further and we ran into this bin of gears that have had the splines broached through the center and the teeth cut into OD.

 

 

Speaking of internal splines…. ever wonder how a company like Warn cut internal splines in a hole this big?

 

 

They do it with “Broach-Zilla”, the largest draw through spline broaching machine west of the Mississippi. This machine is huge, towering over Tech Tim's 6′-6″ height like Godzilla over the Tokyo skyline. When they fire up “Broach-Zilla” and start cutting, the floor moves with each stroke. This is one serious machine doing some serious cutting.

The gold toothed broaches behind me are the cutting tools that Broach-Zilla pushes through the parts, cutting the splines out of the super hard gear material. We passed this cool robot equipped machining cell and had to watch this little bugger for a few minutes, grabbing gear blanks, inserting them into the CNC cutter and then the cutting process.

 

 

We were soon walking past the winch drum welding cell where they use Miller welders to weld the drums together on fixtures designed to keep everything straight and true. Unfortunately we came through during their lunch time, so we missed some cool pics of them welding the drums together.

 

 

From there we ended up in winch drum central, where they final check the drums before they spool them up with either steel wire rope or the Warn Spydura synthetic rope we see on many of the Warn recreational winches people buy.

 

 

Andy walks us over the a bin of Zeon winch drums to show us some of the features that make the Zeon winch top-of-the-line for their recreational winches.

 

 

As we walked by the industrial section Andy grabbed one of the massive planetary gear housings for the Warn 30XL industrial winch. It is so big, the same part for a VR8 could fit inside it.

 

 

Here is a Warn 30XL, the largest winch Warn Industries currently builds. These winches are big, burley and definitely overkill for our needs! Over to the Warn Sheet Metal side! After checking out the winch side of the factory, we moved over to the sheet metal side, where they cut, form and weld the Warn line of bumpers.

 

 

All Warn sheet metal parts start out as large sheets of steel that are then laser cut in-house to the desired shapes, then stacked, tagged and palletized. Ready to move to the forming step.

 

 

The steel plates then move over to the press brakes, where they are bent to the proper shape.

 

 

They then head to the welding stations, where the cut and formed parts are aligned in jigs and welded.

 

 

Right outside of the welding stations was this stack of what looks to be Jeep JL rear bumpers.

 

 

From welding, they go over to prep and then into the big in-house powder coating line you can see on the far side of the fabrication area.

 

 

By now we had seen pretty much everything we could and so it was time to take the obligatory selfie in front of the Warn sign and get back to the road trip we originally started. In today’s global manufacturing business model, it was really great to see how much of Warn’s products are manufactured right there at the factory in Clackamas, Oregon.

 

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