Toyota (previously known as Toyada) first started as a textile business, separating into both a textile and automotive business in 1950. The Toyota museum is located right here in the Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, the Toyota Automobile Museum which shows vintage cars, and the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, which showcases company history, including its start as a textile mill.
Various Toyada’s early inventions from manual textile looms to circular looms, Yarn spinning and Toyoda wooden hand looms and Group operated Type-G automatic looms are all showcased in the museum’s Textile Machinery Pavilion, which is essentially a large workshop housing all the looms. The machines are still running till today, with museum decorators offering live demonstrations of how they work. The mechanical looms are very well thought-through mechanical works of art in its own right, which served as innovation tools to further automate and weave more complex textile patterns and sizes even before the industrial revolution and computer-controlled electronics.
The museum follows chronologically, branching off from the textile industry and transitions into Metalworking and automotive section. Here you get to witness live demonstrations of casting, forging and cutting, where you can witness the actual induction heating, and a large press actually cutting down the metal and quenching right in front of you to produced a forged part. The founding of Toyota’s first every production car, the Toyada standard sedan Model AA and it’s engine prototypes where subsequently introduced leading up to the main car gallery.
The museum ends with an entry to a huge pavilion housing several cars and manufacturing facilities. The amazing fact is that all the production machines on display are actually real factory machines re-purposed for demonstrations. In typical Japanese perfection fashion, they are all done very painstakingly well to its real setting, you can even get to operate a painting production line, a milling machines, robotic assemblers as well as run a 600 ton machine press, Impressive! The museum exits to the partner robot life demonstration, where the museum’s cafeteria and store resides. The partner robots are Toyota’s robotic musicians and orchestra, they do musical performances several times daily here.
Check out more photos of the factory museum here.
