We had the chance recently to spend a week in the Midwest and took full advantage of our time there to see some places we hadn’t been to before, including getting an exclusive tour of two manufacturing plants, the Titan Tire plant in Freeport, IL, and the John Deere stamping plant side-by-side manufacturing facility in Horicon, WI. While in the Midwest we also spent two days with Yamaha Motor Corp. going into great detail on their snowmobile technology.
The week was awesome and we learned a whole lot about a myriad of technical things.
Today, we look back at our tour of the Titan Tire factory in Freeport, IL. We’ve toured several powersports manufacturing plants but never a tire factory.
Titan Tire may not be a household name in the off-road world but you certainly recognize the name Goodyear. Titan Tire recently began production of the extensive lineup of Goodyear ATV and UTV tire designs at the Freeport facility. Titan Tire entered into an agreement with Goodyear last year to bring back the Goodyear name on off-road tires and is now producing nearly 70 sizes and styles of Goodyear tires. And Titan is quite proud of the fact that its ATV and UTV tires are American made and American owned.
We got to see most of the process from start to finish, thanks to the crew at Titan Tire. As you can imagine, making a tire is much more than slapping some rubber together. It’s a highly technical and involved process that has several stages from when the rubber comes in the door as a bale of raw material to when it leaves as a formed tire.
We found one of the most interesting parts of the tour for us is where the rubber is “baked.” In reality, it’s where the rubber is formed—with tread and all—into a tire, in this case an ATV or UTV tire. It is cool to watch, especially when the cover comes off the finished tire and you get the final product which takes hours to make.
Taking photos in the plant isn’t allowed but we were able to get a couple of shots of the tire after it was “baked,” as well as a handful of pics showing the tires manufactured at the plant.
The plant also manufactures farm and mining tires in the Freeport facility.
