Cobra factory tour

Well I spent a lot of time on the road this weekend to go check out the Cobra Factory and do some fishing in a tourney hosted by allkayakfishing.com.

The Cobra factory is in hood, deep in the guts of Comptom.  I looked everywhere for Ice Cube et. al., but I didn't see anybody famous.  Once inside I met Ric in marketing/design and Warren and Glennis the owners.  Everyone was so nice it was ridiculous.  You could tell this was a mellow place because there was about 7-8 dogs from the employees cruising the halls.

In the factory area there was lots of activity.  Kayak molds were all around in various states of process.  The molds looked like madmax kayaks...welded, burnt, and charred yak shapes.  Some molds were cooling, some were spinning and cooling, some were being taken apart and kayaks were being popped out.  While the molds looked thrashed on the outside, they were smooth and gleeming on the inside.  Kinda reminded me of a fresh ab shell....all crusty on the outside, but beautiful inside.

The process involved putting a certain amount of weight of plastic dust inside the mold, then the mold gets put together, then it gets put into a huge 425 deg. oven where it spins and rocks while the plastic dust melts into all of the nooks of the mold.  Then it spins outside of the oven while it cools.  Finally it gets popped out and finalized.  The final touches was the part that was so surprising.  Lots of hand finishing, trimming, and polishing to get a final product.

In the yard outside there was a zillion yaks of all shapes and sizes.  Some stuff we will never see, like rescue boards for australian life guards.  I learned a ton, and saw some cool yaks, and learned a bit about some of the great things to come.

Sean.. that's so cool.  Perhaps, you can take a few pictures (if they'll let you) and write a brief article for us.  It would be sweet... plus it would be good advertising for Cobra.

BTW, did you say Compton?.... were those pitbulls roaming the hallways?

Chuck-I will post some pics later this week.  Compton, as in straight outa Compton.

Scwafish,

Thanks for the visit, we all enjoyed meeting you and showing you around... only sorry the weather was a tad cruddy and the fish weren't biting. Hind Sight is 20/20, and reports from a guy that braved the Redondo launch said the bith was WFO until around 11:30, and from then on it was down to only one fish every ten minutes or so...

Oh well... I figure it was just some bad fishin juju you brought down with you.

Anyhow, a disk of images was burned and sent to you today. Hope you like what I sent.

Have a great day and hopefully we'll see you soon.

Ric "Rikshaw" Hawthorne
Cobra Kayaks