Rockford Fosgate Factory Tour

Summer of 2003, I got a chance to go out to Rockford Fosgate's facilities in Tempe, AZ. This is where they design product, marketing, distribution of some products and assembly of some of the electronics. This is also where the home of RTTI is, where some of the best installs in the world are performed.

We went to the warehouse in Gilbert first. Besides loudspeakers, pretty much everything else ships from here. RF amps, RF Connecting punch, Lightning Audio accesories, Lightning Audio electronics, MB Quart Amps, Hafler, Fosgate Avionics, Nissan OEM, etc.

Next, we went touring the assembly line. I have had a chance to see assembly lines for electronics in Korea so I wasn't too surprised to see what goes on in building an amplifier.

Here are two pretty high tech part stuffing machines. Some of the newer surface mount parts are so small they don't actually get placed on the board, but puffed on (like an ink jet printer, where it blows the ink out). Some of the machines are dual head (so one head loads up with parts while the other one puts the parts on the board). They can load quite a few parts at the same time (which is why you see several sizes of small parts on a roll).

Here is a closeup view of the machine. The machines make noises like typewriters or older inject printers (bapbapbapbapbap). Of course something like this is controlled by a computer.

After all the surface mount stuff is put on the boards, they are put into a computer controlled oven. The oven has several zones, which gradually heat up and gradually cool down the circuit board. The oven is used to melt the solder to attach all the surface mount pieces.

Rockford's amps attach the output transistors in a sliglty different way. They attach the transistors to a small board and then bond that board to the heatsink instead of clamping. Since these tranistors aren't a part of the main board, they have to be attached to a smaller circuit board. They use some of the older board stuff machines to do some of this work.

This is a really cool machine. It takes a finished board and then optically scans to make sure nothing moved around in the process that would cause an amp to fail (some of the parts are the size of half a grain of rice, so it doesn't take much to knock one out of alignment).

After they are done with the surface mount stuff and quality control, the amps are loaded onto a cart and taken to the part of the factory where the through hole (the stuff where the circuit board has a hole (or holes) where a component is put all the way through the board. Tyically this is done by hand.

Before we headed over to the board stuffing area, we got a peak at the OEM cell (for guys like Nissan). We couldn't walk into the area, they had static straps and other QC measures that they have have started to implement on the aftermarket side.

I was kind of bummed I didn't get a picture of the machine they use to help the assembler assemble the amplifier. The amps are built in a certain order with some parts showing up multiple times on a board. To help that, they have a table with a overhead laser pointer. The pointer works in sync with a tray that opens and closes. So if a Part XYZ is being put onto the board, only the bin with that part is exposed. Then the pointer shows where to put that part, and if there is more than one it poitns to the next spot after the first one has been fitted (it can sense when a part has been put through the board). It speeds up the process and makes it much harder to mess up. After all the parts are put onto the board, they are run through what is called a wave soldering machine. It is basically a conveyor belt that runs over a tank of solder and solders everything that has been placed on the board. As you can see, the circuit board is attached to a metal jig so it can be run through.

After that, on to QC. Here they test the amplifier with all kinds of fun computerized stuff (Audio Precision) and this is where they get the birthsheets. As soon as they pass, they get the sticker with the specs, and all the other stuff that usually comes in the box. To make sure you do get all the goodies you are supposed to, they don't print the birthsheet until the person putting the amp in the box has tripped all the sensors for the owners manual and hardware. Then the bottom is attached to the amp, the amp is shrink wrapped and into a box it goes.