Where Are KC Turbos Built?

KC Turbos is an American company specializing in high-performance turbochargers for trucks and pickups, fitting engines like the 7.3 Power Stroke (being one of the best performance upgrades for that powertrain) in addition to other popular American forced-induction units like the EcoBoost, Cummins, and Duramax. According to resale sites and their own website, the products typically command several thousand dollars for complete turbo kits, comprised of a wide variety of separate components. Obviously, there's the turbo itself, plus additional parts like piping, wastegate, and other mechanical bits, electronic equipment, and brackets. Each of these parts can be further divided into its components, with many being foreign-sourced (a common factor across turbos in general, granted).

Turbos, along with many of the other parts KC Turbos offers, are complex pieces. The business itself primarily specializes in sourcing and assembling the individual items that make up the whole, with these items coming from all over the world. Most turbos contain components sourced from countries like China, the Czech Republic, Japan, Vietnam, Denmark, Mexico, the United States, and so on; it's a global supply chain, after all. So if one were to take a KC turbo off the shelf at random and break it down into its component parts, it'll likely contain more than a few countries.

The simple answer is that KC Turbos is a globalized remanufacturing (remanning) company, although the warehouse and facilities are all located in Mesa, Arizona, which is where the final product is assembled and packaged. There are various reasons why these companies outsource specialized component sourcing internationally, which we'll get into, and also take a look at the manufacturing side of the company itself. Let's take a deep dive and see what typically comes from where and how much of a KC Turbo is truly American-made.

The global supply chain is admittedly an incredibly complex and evolving organism, as companies open and close, specialized knowledge moves around the world, and prices versus quality fluctuates. KC Turbos is by no means a bespoke company building everything internally; rather, they're primarily assemblers and remanufacturers — meaning, they take used or discarded components and rebuild them. Much like the car using the turbocharger, many parts are outsourced to other companies, and assembly involves taking all of these and putting them together like a big jigsaw puzzle, then doing quality testing.

KC Turbos boasts a warehouse full of products from all over the world, with supplies produced by companies like Garrett and automakers like Ford, along with specialized electrical components like chips, each of which is built in different regions. All of the quality control is conducted in-house, as is the general assembly and manufacturing of various larger parts. These include machined components to a degree, but the vast majority of KC Turbos' responsibility is in the final product; machining is typically outsourced to Val-Tech in Tempe, Arizona. Val-Tech is a small machine shop that does fabrication, welding, milling — everything necessary to create, repair, and hone the parts before final assembly.

The order of operations, therefore, is as follows: Parts come into KC Turbos, which then boxes them all up in pallets and ships them to Val-Tech. Val-Tech does all the machining work in-house, then they go back to KC Turbos' warehouse for the stamp of approval. That final step is arguably the most important, considering the precise nature of how turbochargers work.

First things first: KC Turbos performs remanufacturing work, which means sourcing parts from all over the world, breaking them down, and rebuilding them with either brand-new components manufactured at Val-Tech, or stuff sourced from the factories themselves. Similar work is done for other components, like engines (though sometimes you may want to rebuild versus remanufacture such massive components). That's why there's no good answer to the question of where your KC turbo comes from, specifically; depending on what you order, it may have originally been produced in any number of different countries, then assembled in others before landing in the Arizona warehouse for remanning.

Ultimately, the vast majority of turbo companies follow this pattern, using various international sources (sometimes identical sources) before assembling the final product. KC Turbos also buys these units; take, for example, Garrett turbochargers. These turbos often come in boxes labeled with "Made in China" or "Assembled in Mexico" on the front before KC gets a hold of them. Similarly, Ford products sport a "Made in the Czech Republic" badge on them.

Overall, then, KC Turbos does do its own work, of course, and that could be categorically stated as "Made in America using foreign components," to be the most accurate. And the same goes for its remanufacturing processes, albeit with less original machining than a totally bespoke component, obviously. And all that makes sense because, frankly, it's a smaller company that doesn't have the money or facilities to produce everything to high standards in-house; the specialist engineers aren't always around in America. But the final checks, storage, and shipping are all done out of a family-run warehouse, and have been since 2014.