We got up early this morning and headed over to the Kohler Design Center for a three-hour factory tour, 8:30-11:30 a.m. We were assigned to a tour group of 10 led by a retired Kohler employee and started by watching a short video where we learned that the original Kohler bathtub was made by adding legs to a hog scalding trough in 1873, thus launching Kohler into the plumbing business. We also got instructions for our tour (stay with your tour guide, wear close toed flat shoes, no cameras allowed....). We were issued safety glasses and headsets so we could hear the guide over the roar of the factory floor.
We visited the pottery building, the iron foundry, and the bronze casting building. We saw molten metal being poured into molds and giant robots picking up and painting cast steel bathtubs that had just come cherry red from the ovens. It was all very interesting, but way too long. After three hours and three miles of walking, mainly in hot, noisy factory settings, we were glad to get back to the Design Center.
There we walked around the multi-level, well lit showroom, surrounded by Kohler fixtures in a variety of colors and designs, though most of what we saw in production was standard white. Upstairs were kitchens and baths created by decorators in a variety of appealing and unusual styles. One spa bath display was larger than our entire living space by far.
After lunch we packed up and headed up through Green Bay and into Door County to our campsite located near the shore of Green Bay between Sturgeon Bay and Egg Harbor. It’s a pull-through under the trees, and very nice except that those darn trees make it impossible to set up our TV and Internet dishes. Verizon service here is spotty, so our modem doesn’t work either, so if we want to get our email or post our blogs, we’ll have to go out to a coffee shop or find a cell tower….
After dinner we drove out to find a beach to watch the sunset over Green Bay. We passed many long driveways leading to secluded places along the bay and finally came to a county park with a boat launch, beach, and picnic area. We walked with Sweetie out on the pier and watched the red disk of the sun set through the clouds over the bay.
 Our campsite at Monument Point |  Sunset over Green Bay from Frank E. Murphy County Park |
Later we played a game of Reversi. I seemed to be doing well, but the tide turned and Ken won handily, leaving me frustrated and in the dark about what I had done wrong. I’ll have to do some research on Reversi strategy.
When we set up camp and started to unhitch, we realized that although we could open the hitch jaws, they wouldn’t stay open. The pin holding the lock catch spring had fallen out again. To unhitch, we finally removed the pins holding the hitch plate to the base and raised the trailer high enough, with the hitch plate attached to the king pin, that it cleared the hitch base. Tomorrow we’ll call Pull-Rite to get their advice.
By the way, with my safety background, I was very concerned about some of the practices we saw on the Kohler factory floors. Signs warned that hard hats were required, but half the workers weren’t wearing them, for example. At more than one point our tour group walked across the path of a fork lift or through a moving conveyor line of heavy bathtubs, without warning. One area had a sign showing 41 days since a lost time accident, and another showed 11 days. Unless they’ve had a run of bad luck, that augurs very poor safety practices. We were told that they haven’t lost a tour participant yet, fortunately.
0 comments:
Post a Comment