Today my wife and I spent a 2 plus hour tour of

[stude]

The Winnebago plant in Forest City, Iowa great tour guide. We arrived within 8 min. of it starting, from St. Paul, MN where we had been camping for a few days. yesterday my wife toured me through the Mall of America and oh boy did I hurt by the time I got back to MH slept pretty good.
Get up when alarm goes off but only after second noise happened as it sounded like some of the birds in the Camp ground, (wife's Phone). We head our to dump tanks and get going man what a trip.
Everyone should do this tour it is a real learning curve but worst of it all is they do not show you the interior structure of the unit like what is in the walls and what is supporting them same for the roof, but they do a real good job on the Floor that sits on the frame and it is out of site done well. U do get to see how the windows, doors, roof holes are all cut out by a machine, along with the amount of foam sandwiched between exterior wall and interior wall and how they are all finished. They also tour you to the Frame shop and how they arrive and everyone thought train but no they all come by truck they keep the train and tracks there in case the union operated trucks go out on strike they can then keep the Frames arriving.
They also showed us how they do the upholstery and install the Zippers etc. similar to what my wife does when she is doing upholstery but my wife would love to have the Zipper system for her sewing machine. I think a Computer will do this job one of these days.
They have around 3000 employees all working there and 96% of the stuff they use in the motorhomes etc. are made right there in that plant in one of the dozen or so buildings on site.
This is a non-union plant, starting wage is around $13/$14 dollars an hour with lots of senior personaly making a lot more than start wages.
We were told that the City of Forest City has a population of 4300 so remove the employees who mostly live in the area or in a MH etc. all come from other places not Forest City and they do have a problem in finding enough people to come and live this way.
They even have a personal Bus system to go and pick people up and bring them to work.
Stude