ARP Fasteners is the premier name in automotive fasteners, and we know the reason why! We got to see first hand the entire operation over there from raw materials all the way to finished goods, and everything in between, on a recent tour with some pretty cool Top Fuel guys from the Schumacher and Al Anabi NHRA race teams. There were literally no closed doors for us on our recent trip, and I couldn’t have been more wrong when I thought that I was going to walk around and look at bolts for a couple hours. The guys and gals at ARP rule! Not only because they were so gracious and fun to be around all day, but because they are proving that American Manufacturing is alive and well. If ARP can do what they do here in the California, then they should be an inspiration to the rest of the industry, and all the naysayers who claim you can’t manufacture anything in the United States.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT ARP-BOLT.COM

When I was on the phone with Chris Raschke, head of Sales and Marketing at ARP, about head studs for Larson and I’s 5 second S-10, my only thought was the hope that Chris and the guys at ARP could save us. We needed something special, and their ultra tough super double throwdown 625 studs were just the answer, but I needed them ASAP. As usual, Chris and the crew came through, but before taking delivery of them Chris asked if I wanted to come down and go on a tour of ARP with some of the NHRA Top Fuel guys. Of course I said yes!

Gary Holzapfel founded ARP in 1968 using his aircraft fastener experience to create better fasteners for his racing buddies because he saw that their worst problems were usually caused by fastener failure that resulted in catastrophic engine damage. From one machine, and experience manufacturing bolts, he started an empire in his back yard garage. Now the Holzapfel family runs the finest fastener company in the world. Getting a chance to stop by and check out how all that goes down was something we weren’t going to miss.

When I showed up at ARP, I was expecting to walk around a couple buildings for a few hours and head back home. I had no idea what Chris really had planned, or just how big ARP’s facilities are. After taking a trip down the road to Ventura Speedway, where the gang got to play with some Sprint Cars, we went to the first of several ARP facilities for the day. Wait! Sprint Cars? Yeah, we went over to Cory Kruseman’s sprint car school to see what Top Fuel crew chiefs look like driving! That’s another story though, and we’ll run that one later.

So we get to the first building, of several we would see on the tour, and the first stop is a warehouse full of spools of wire. Not wire like you run electricity through, but wire as in coils of material that will ultimately be straightened out and made into nuts and bolts. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of spools of this stuff, and we’d find out later it’s not the only one full of materials like this. It was at this point that I finally started to realize what I was in for. After making some statement about assuming that the bolts, studs, and nuts came to ARP already cut to at least a rough size, Chris informed me that there isn’t a single stage of production that isn’t handled in house at ARP. They are the ONLY high performance fastener company doing everything in house. Wow, I was in for a treat.

Walking across the lot we entered building number two, where the materials are straightened, cut, and formed in an operation called heading. Yep, this is where a bolt starts to look like a bolt because they forge the head on it. The machines inside ARP are amazing, and there are jillions of them. What’s most impressive is the fact that while the machines in the heading department are not “new” with regards to year of manufacture, all of them have been restored and made better than new inside ARP’s Restoration and Maintenance department. Chris told us that these machines were, for the most part, made prior to the mid 1980’s because the chassis and such on them were much heavier back then. These machines from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s have all been meticulously restored, their mechanical components redesigned and/or machined to closer tolerances, and their process more precisely controlled so as to manufacture the finest fasteners available. Looking at them, I believe every word. These machines run thousands of parts per day, and having stout pieces is key to making sure the machines will create the same quality from the first of the month to the last.

Throughout the heading plant we saw bins of bolts in various states. It’s sheer number of fasteners in this building was jaw dropping. And because each bolt is made to the appropriate length, so that no material is wasted by cutting of longer bolts into shorter ones, you would see bins big enough to hold a couple bodies, all the way down to these trays that look like cake pans, and each one held fasteners for a particular order or run of parts. There are thousands and thousands of the small cake pan size bins in all the buildings, and they are either hauled around on pallets, or by workers who drag them along the polished concrete with a hook on a handle.

Keep in mind too that some of these machines are bigger than cars, and have doors so that you can walk inside them to maintain them. In some cases ARP’s restoration team will work with engineers and design their own machines to do certain operations on fasteners. We saw this throughout our tour.

And while some of the machines perform multiple operations on a bolt, like straightening, cutting, and heading, there are machines that have one sole purpose and do one fastener at a time. Efficiency becomes key when you have a machine that only does one thing, and the employees at ARP are very highly trained and well cared for. You can tell because the pride in their work is much higher than you might expect from people working in manufacturing. Everyone had smiles on their faces when we were there, and every one was happy to explain their job, the process that the machine was doing, and what process followed. When we asked how long most people had been working there, Chris responded that while a lot of employees have been there for more than a decade, the truth is there are a lot of them that have been there for two decades. Every employee knew Chris, and he knew every one of them.

After the heading process, all the fasteners are taken through the heat treat process in yet another building. Here a bunch of heat treating furnaces are constantly running to heat treat massive racks of fasteners. This is one of the stages in the manufacturing process that ARP does differently, and it’s more expensive because of the extra time, but worth it with regards to the quality. In most heat treating operations of parts, a basket of parts is slid into the heat treating furnace for a particular period of time as dictated by the material and level of heat treat desired. The same thing happens with ARP, but with one big difference. Rather than having the basket full of a pile of bolts, ARP organizes all the fasteners in racks so that none are laying on each other. If a pile of parts goes through the heat treat process and some of them are laying on each other, then their entire surface doesn’t get the heat treat. This is not the case with ARP, as each fastener is able to receive the same heat treat on all surfaces. It’s a small thing, but so is a rod bolt, and when one goes back it breaks all the big stuff too. On our custom studs, the spec sheet we signed off on called for very specific heat treating instructions. They were heated to 1275 degrees for 4 hours and then allowed to cool to 1100 degrees for another 4 hours, in order to achieve a tensile strength of a minimum of 260.000 PSI.

In yet another building, across town, all the heat treated fasteners go for shot peening, cleanup, polishing, etc. Giant vibratory cleaners and polishers filled with ceramic pellets and a detergent solution clean the parts so they are ready for the next stage in their operation.

In this same building all the stud fastener operations are handled. This is where fasteners with no heads are born. Our 625 head studs just might be in one of those bins if we’re lucky! At this point in the tour we’d been there for a while, and were still like kids in a candy store. I thought Chris was going to have to tie a string to me so that he could pull on it and get me to keep moving. These machines are so cool, and the smell of machine oil and metal was awesome. I’m the guy who can hardly stand the smell of the lumber yard, but machine oil. metal, and welding smell great to me!

Not every machine at ARP is old, in fact there are plenty of CNC machines as you get farther along in the process of making a complete nut and bolt. In what must have been our 5th building, these machines perform a variety of functions, and can be tasked with different jobs for different fasteners. As we got into the Nut Blanking and threading departments I also noticed a lot of testing equipment on the production line. Microscopes, thread pitch testers, and much more are used on a regular basis to test the quality. And this is just on the manufacturing lines, there is also a complete department just for testing stuff. They get to break things too.

In the Nut Blanking department we got to see machines that take a spool of raw material, like the wire we saw warehoused for the creation of bolts, and make them into nuts. There are multiple machines making them, and at various rates. Some machines make smaller batches and are slower, while others are very quick and can push out high volume. Like some of the heading machines, these nut blanking machines perform multiple forming operations in stages. When the material enters the machine and is cut to length it will go through a forging process that makes sure it is round, that part then moves over and is formed slightly more, all while another new piece is getting the same treatment this one got only one stage ago. This process goes on so that each part goes through 5 stages before becoming a nut with no hole in it. That parts gets knocked out later.

After the centers are punched out of the nuts, they go onto cleaning like the bolts did earlier. Then they are moved back to this building for threading operations. Threading a nut is hard, and requires a lot of good taps, well sort of. The machines that ARP has developed to be able to thread nuts quickly and efficiently are pretty impressive. Like a lot of the machines in the threading department, most of the nut threading machines are designed and built in house.

In another area of the same building all the grinding operations happen. Remember all those bolts that went through heat treat and then cleaning? Well, each of them now goes through the grinding process to get the finished diameter, any shoulders, bullet point on the end, etc. All of the fasteners are centerless ground, between stones of various contours, and these stones are dressed and “calibrated” regularly to insure the correct contour to each fastener. Digital readouts and instrumentation tell the operator when the fastener is done, and each fastener is done individually.

After grinding, each fastener is moved to threading. There are a variety of machines doing the threading, and they range from automated machines that take bolts from a hopper and feed them into the threaders that roll the threads, all the way to the manually operated threaders that require an operator to place each bolt and watch it thread and repeat. When we asked one employee, who Chris told us was the head of that particular area in the threading department, how many bolts she could thread in a day, she told us a few thousand. That’s amazing, and all while she is also managing a team and working other machines. All the employees are trained on how to operate, setup, calibrate, and maintain their machines.

Once bolts are finished being threaded, they are sent to yet another building for packaging and sorting. Some bolts, nuts, and studs from each batch are taken to the testing area where they use this big machine to pull bolts and studs apart in order to measure tensile strength. Other tools are used to inspect threads at the near microscopic level. Materials are also tested before and after heat treating.

Here are the tables where the fine folks in shipping make sure your parts go out the door after you ordered them from your favorite online retailer, or to fulfill an order from your local speedshop since you bought their last package of 7/16 rod bolts. Many of ARP’s fasteners are sold in kit form, to make it easier for customers to make sure they have ALL the fasteners they need for a particular job, but you can also order ARP fasteners in quantity to stock your shop.

We had a great time on our tour with Chris and the rest of the crew at ARP. It was a really fun day, that went way longer than we expected, and it was well worth the time. I hope our little tour recap gives you some idea of how these fasteners are created, because we’ve just glazed over it. There is so much going on, and it’s so encouraging to see it all happening. I’m a junky for manufacturing stuff and tours in general, but there are a few things that really made ARP special for me.  The fact that ARP is the ONLY high performance fastener manufacturer that handles ever aspect of manufacturing in house, impresses the hell out of me. Gary Holzapfel, ARP’s founder said “Over the years, we have found, through experience, that the only way to maintain the quality we require is to keep everything in-house. From heading through machining, grinding, heat-treat, thread rolling, and shot-peening to black oxide treatment we perform every operation in house on our own equipment with our own employees.” I’m also impressed by the fact that there is not a single short cut on quality for the sake of higher production. I can say that unequivocally because there are plenty of things they are not doing the most efficient way with regards to volume, and the only reason is because it produces a better product. The fact that Gary Holzapfel founded ARP here in California, in his backyard garage, and has continued to build and grow this family run business despite economic challenges that some say are too much to keep manufacturing in the United States, let alone California, also impresses the hell out of me.

Manufacturing, engineering, inventiveness… these are just three of the words that describe characteristics of American business in it’s prime. Seeing a company doing what ARP is doing, and the way they are doing it, is truly inspiring. I was impressed, and thankful to have been invited.

Oh, and those studs for the heads on our 620 cubic inch twin turbo beast in the truck? Oh yeah, those little 7/16″ studs held 50 lbs of boost no problem, wait until we give it even more! Thanks ARP, we appreciate the help, and were proud to have you on board.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ARP FASTENERS, CLICK HERE TO VISIT ARP-BOLTS.COM

Check out the cool toys they have in the ARP shop as well. There are tons more, but we only had so much time to spend drooling.