Another adventurous day! This time, we visited our first company, Hoerbiger, a supplier for parts for automobiles along with other things. Hoerbiger is a privately owned company operating around the globe consisting of almost 6,000 employees and making over a billion dollars in revenue every year. The company emphasizes open offices to encourage cooperation. I think this company has a bright future ahead of it, but needs to be aware of the larger changes throughout various industries. Hoerbiger should look at expected demand for products in the future, making use of its skills for its current products to make related, in-demand products.
The first factory we visited produces piezo valves, which promise highly accurate, super reliable, extremely quick, and extremely energy-efficient valves. With piezo valves, one can control the rate at which fluids flow through a pipe with much granularity, allowing for use in ventilators to control human breathing in the hospital, an application that boomed when Covid hit. The factory to produce these valves involves maintaining the production lines squeaky clean, while the lines themselves were fairly small in size and involved plenty of waiting for the chips to age as a break-in process. Quality assurance was also highly emphasized in several stages of the production line.
The second factory produces gears and other parts used in manual transmissions. I found this factory to be much more interesting than the first, because it quickly produced many many parts on an industrial scale, allowing for a low end cost. And for a seemingly simple part like a gear, the production line was surprisingly long, involving pressing, vibrating, reacting with ammonia gas in a furnace, and chemically bonding the friction layer to the gear, with quality assurance checks along the way. It reminded me of Factorio, specifically modded Factorio, like my current Bobs+Angel’s playthrough because there are many different processes to make the same things using different ingredients and different buildings to execute the process, each with different yields and byproducts. It got me thinking about taking an industrial engineering or an additional chemistry class in the future.
Last but not least, we got to visit the Alps! We took a gondola up to the top of a mountain, 5600 feet above sea level. Unfortunately, we did not do any hiking; hopefully that will be covered when we visit Neuschwanstein castle a week from now. Fortunately, the views were absolutely stunning, reminding me of a combination of 50% Sun Valley, Idaho, and 10% Yosemite, and 40% the beautiful rolling fields and villages I’ve already been seeing in Germany over the past few days.