CONTINENTAL Tire the Americas’s 1 million sq ft plant in a 23-acre site in Sumter will start production by the beginning of next year, after a year and a half since the ground breaking of the site.
A media tour was held recently at the nearly completed facility, which will roll out tyres and is expected to generate 300 jobs once it opens in January.
Plant Engineering Manager, Tom Tompkins, says that the plant could even begin production before the end of the year.
“We hope to begin in January 2014, but we’re striving to do better than that,” he said during the step-by-step tour of Continental’s manufacturing process. “Most of the machines are functional. They’re just in the testing phase. We’ve already produced test tyres as a finished product.”
The tyres produced in Sumter were shipped to Continental headquarters in Hanover, Germany, and were tested for quality control.
Tompkins describes briefly the production process at the Sumter plant; it will make tyres with raw rubber shipped into one end and the tyres coming down an elevated conveyor belt into a warehouse on the other end. Natural and synthetic rubber imported from Malaysia will be mixed in a number of compound chemicals, he says. The rubber then moves in a “slab” so workers can put in tread, coating and a wire metal rim, essentially every part of the tyre-making process, he adds.
The plant will produce an estimated 4.5 million tyres annually, thereafter increasing the capacity to 8 million by 2021.