(Editor's Note: This is the first in a "How They Build It" series of stories that will examine the manufacturing process of the products you use on your 4x4. Down the road, we'll delve into items such as driveline and engine components, body accessories, and specialty items.)
This 37x12.50R17LT Discoverer...
This 37x12.50R17LT Discoverer STT is the largest off-highway tire that Cooper manufactures for the Cooper brand. Cooper does, however, produce off-highway tires up to a 40-inch diameter and a 20-inch rim diameter for private-label customers.
To get a handle on the tire-making process, we visited Cooper Tires' headquarters in Findlay, Ohio. Cooper is a name that is very familiar to 'wheelers, as the company makes a slew of light-truck tires, including a variety of designs under the popular Discoverer name. Cooper also manufactures tires under its proprietary brands, Mastercraft, Starfire, Dean, and Avon. Little known fact: Cooper is one of only two American-owned tire companies.
Under the guidance of Michelle Zeisloft and Jenny Fuerst, we toured the fascinating Technical Center and then the mind-blowing Tall Timbers Mold Operations. Due to the highly competitive nature of the tire business, we didn't get to tour the we'd-show-you-but-then-we'd-have-to-kill-you assembly facility, but Cooper provided photos and an overview of the processes that happen there.
What we learned at Cooper is that there's a lot of tech and quality control integrated into a modern tire, and there's an army of dedicated professionals behind the scenes from start to finish. It's also extremely complicated. The following is a condensed version of the tire manufacturing process, which will show you the highlights of some of the steps that go into a tire. The end result is a safe, effective, and durable set of tires under your rig.
1. Our first stop was Cooper's $9.9-million Technical Center, where we met Research and Technology Manager Dave Dryden and Product Development Manager Marcus Hancock. This 49,000-square-foot facility was built in 1998, and it is home to a variety of mechanical and chemical engineers, chemists, and physicists. These folks speak a language all their own, and they can regale you with complex verbiage that'll make your head spin. This division is a technical nirvana. One of their many tools is Virtual Tire Technology, which allows them to design, test, and evaluate tires on the desktop (though they do create and test rolling prototypes here too). Some of the benefits of Virtual Tire Technology-or Vt2ech-are that it allows them to get products to market faster with lower cost while constantly improving the product. Here, Principal SUV/Light Truck Tire Development Engineer Kenneth Reuille shows us how he can perform complex tire tests on his computer-virtually.
 2. The Technical Center includes...  2. The Technical Center includes a 7,500-square-foot materials laboratory where tire materials are tested. Materials are stretched, pushed, pulled, and generally abused during ongoing research and development. An example of the machines they use is this unit, which is used to test rubber pellets. It can heat them, freeze them, and squash them to determine durability. |  3. The Technical Center has...  3. The Technical Center has some of the coolest tools ever, and a few have names that are real tongue-twisters. Some are proprietary, and thus secret. One of the workhorse machines is this scanning electron microscope. It allows chemists to micro-analyze the microscopic interface of rubber to rubber, or rubber to steel (for instance), on a molecular level. |  4. By now you've probably...  4. By now you've probably noticed that computers are an integral part of Cooper's R&D and manufacturing process. Well, here's another one. This one is responsible for actually telling the machinery in the shop how to cut the molds. |
5. Cooper has its own highly advanced in-house mold division called Tall Timbers Mold Operations, and this stand-alone facility is where, as they put it, ideas are turned into metal. Yes, metal. Because in order to make a tire, one of things you need is a mold, and that mold needs to be cut. Here you can see the workstation responsible for creating the sidewall of a tire. As you know, there are gobs of information on the sidewall of a tire. It's these folks' job to make sure that everything that needs to be there, is there. This department, and others like it, take the proposal from the styling department and turn it into solid models so that they can supply the cam department with tool pathing to cut metal.