,
Everything they make starts as a straight tube of stainless steel. There are giant racks as far as the eye can see in every corner of every room with tubes of varying wall thicknesses and diameters depending on the application.
The stainless steel tubes are cut to length by this roll-cutter, which cuts the pipe without creating any burrs. This is a faster, cleaner, more efficient method than using a traditional cutting wheel or band saw. Cutting down on wasted time and energy with better processes and technologies results in more consistent and better products while saving money in the end. This philosophy permeates the entire company.
Here you can see two of the many digital benders at the Kooks facility. Before anything is bent, the operator selects what needs to be made on a digital touch-screen. An image and description of the part is displayed for confirmation of what is needed before anything is ever bent. This cuts down on cost, time, and error. Once you hit go, the part is created before your very eyes.
At every station we walked by, Papa Kooks was passing on his decades of knowledge and experience to his employees. You can see his enthusiasm for making great products on this face as well as everyone in the company. With a great demeanor, Papa Kook also has a great sense of humor. Before we even met him, he scared the crap out of my photographer by yelling at him for taking pictures in the R&D room where we were shooting, which obviously was not a problem.
Here we see a C7 Corvette header being created. After the tubes are bent, they are laid out on their respective jigs and are tacked into place. The merge collectors are added and they are off to the welding station for completion. Now it’s starting to look like a header.
Once the headers are bent and tack welded into place, they make their way to the welding stations where the expert welders complete the welding with both MIG and TIG welds depending on the need for the application. Here we see headers for a NASCAR K&N racecar on the rotisserie. They are made in pairs and both right and left bank headers are on opposite sides of the jig.
Here we can see the beautiful TIG welds performed on a merge collector by the craftsmen at Kooks.
Once welded, the headers are ready to be boxed and shipped to their new homes and installed under the hood of something cool.