Monday 9-30 Airstream Tour

Airstream Tour

We had a wonderful day. Since we were going to be in Ohio for a few weeks Larry has been looking for things to see and do. He found that the Airstream Manufacturing Plant is in Jackson City and they offer free guided tours. They do one tour a day at 2:00 Monday through Friday. Airstream is only 35 miles from where we have been staying. We hung around the campground until 11:30.

As we were leaving the park we filled the Minnie with water and dumped the tanks. We didn't go directly to Jackson City, on our way we stopped at Walmart and Aldi to do a little grocery shopping.

We arrived a little after 1:00, we didn't know where to go so we stopped at the guard gate and asked. He told us it was the building behind us. Larry turned around and headed over to the building. Airstream has RV parking in the back of the lot for customers to stay while they get their Airstream worked on. The sites have full hookups, they are free for the customers that are having service done and other RVs can stay for $10.00. Larry stopped in the office and asked about a site, they told him just to choose a site that wasn't taken and come back and pay for it. We are the only RV that wasn't an Airstream. The cool thing about the RV parking and service is that when it's time for your appointment they will come and pickup your Airstream and take it over for service. When they're finished they return it to your site. At the end of the day if they have not finished they will still return you trailer so you can use it overnight and they will pick it up again the next morning.

After setting up the Minnie we walked over to the lobby, we paid for our camping spot and signed in for the tour. There were 22 people for the tour. The tour guide was an employee and he had another employee hold his speaker. The tour took two hours. One and a half hours was a tour of the manufacturing floor for the Airstreams. The last half hour was on the Mercedes Airstream manufacturing floor. You couldn't take pictures while walking through the manufacturing floor but there were Airstreams in the parking lot. The employees work from 6:00 am until 3:30 pm Monday through Thursday and on Friday they work four hours. They produce 20 Airstreams a day, 90 per week. On the Mercedes Airstreams they manufacture five a week. Currently if you want an Airstream you have to wait six months. The tour was good but it didn't flow from the beginning to the end product. We skipped around. The facility was very clean. There was hardly any automation, the only automation was a machine to cut some of the holes. In the lobby are there is a store where you can buy lots of parts for your Airstream along with tee shirts, hats and other souvenirs. We had fun learning about the manufacturing process of building an Airstream.

The least expensive Airstream trailer is only 16 feet long, pricing starts at about 40k. Their largest trailer is 33 feet long and is more than 160k. Their van based campers start at 160k and go to about 240k.

Airstream can't keep up, they are 6 months behind on production and they are in the process of building a brand new 330,000 sq. ft. facility a couple of miles down the road.

Camping with the Airstream RVs

An Airstream Nest

Airstream 345 model

Bambi Airstream

An old Airstream

A Mercedes Airstream waiting to be serviced

It is record setting hot, the average high for this date is 70, by the time we got back to the Minnie it was 96 degrees, we were so glad we had power to run the A/C. We hung around the Minnie for the rest of the day reading.