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Fania and BBT go a long way back.

With thousands of cables sold per year and hardly any complaints we feel we have a good brand of cable on offer for the right price.

Fania is in the beautiful city of Itajubà, a mere 400km north of Sao Paolo.
It’s a long drive so I decided to make myself a mobile office on the back seat of my driver Emerson’s car…:)

The moments I wasn’t working I was spoiled with the beautiful Brazilian landscape.

Arrived we start first with a factory tour before our meeting.
@ Fania everything starts with raw material arriving.

Test, test, test is the big secret of the Fania quality, incoming raw material, half product and finished product.
All are tested thoroughly on the most sophisticated test equipment necessary.

The production happens in several different departments… I will try to give you an overview…
Here is part of the assembly department.

Cable winder department….

Plastic injection department…

This was my favorite department Speedo cable winding…

A speedo cable is made from 4 times 4 wires over one central cable,
Let me try to show how it works in next the video.

Video not visible? Click HERE

More cable winding machines.

Small eagle view from the assembly hall.

The city of Itajubà is situated in the state of Minas Gerais a mere 586.520km² in size, that’s almost 20 times! Belgium (30.528 km²) and that’s only one state, not even 7% of the total Brazilian surface of 8.502.728km².

They always told me they have good coffee in Minas Gerais, I can approve all rumors now…:)

The way back was even more beautiful as the way up… we took a slightly different road…

What a trip, what a day…

I want to thank Edgar, Luiz, Liliane and the entire Fania team for this wonderful meeting and tour, I think we both learned a lot and our partnership become only stronger!
The Fania brand will appear on our website soon and we will show the Fania logo’s with pride.

If you have any Fania need or question, or like to produce whatever cable, please contact us, for sure we can help You.

Oh yes, a very special thank you to my driver, Emerson, Brazilian best driver! If you ever need a driver in Southern Brazil, I can only recommend him!

We visit factories every single working day, somedays three, more often four different.
Or we have meetings in hotel lobby’s or private offices…

Some factories leave deep impressions. And we’re very happy to share with you.
Unfortunately most big OE suppliers do have a “no pictures” philosophy…:(…. sorry for that.

Our fuel pump rebuild kit manufacturer was one of the major stops this trip.

After a 4 hour monster meeting discussing every part from our fuel pump rebuild kits, one by one, every single component, we can say that we will improve quality of these kits quite a bit. We need some new tooling and procedures, but we estimate to start to deliver the improved kits by the end of the year. Meanwhile we keep on delivering our existing kits.

We also stopped by one of our taillight producers.
It was good to see they enlarged quite a bit last couple of years…

Raw material… will this become your taillight?

This is one of their plastic injection machines to make Beetle and Bus taillights for us…

Everybody loves Bob, here in Brazil its a little ant with over 5 million followers on YouTube
Check it out on you Tube under Bob Zoom, its pretty cool made!

A slice of real meat anyone?

Ever questioned how a relay is born?
We visited a relative new supplier for our relays, its a rather smaller manufacturer , but one that can work flexible and garantee all of his product for two years.

He will made most of our relays under private label.
Let’s check it out….

They start with connectors…:)

and a lot of assembly work…

This is where they wind the spools…

…. and assemble…

Finally we need a golden handshake times to times right?

Marcel agreed to make a new badge of our Westfalia tent poles…. now we’re talking…:)

Stay tuned for more updates!