Sunday, December 21, 2014

(33) Working as a Contract Engineer (7/8)

I retired as 71-years old in 2007. I announced my intention to everybody I was working for and with, and I began to work on the text for these blogs almost immediately, without giving any thoughts to publishing. I hurried a bit expecting an offer of work, which never came (to my relief, but with a bit of disappointment as well).

I was offered a permanent position at the truck manufacturing company a few years before my retirement. The offer I politely declined for two reasons: I would lose some 30% of income, and also, I did not wish to become part of the corporate culture. Being a contractor I did not mind faults left deliberately by the management in the new vehicles, and I could tolerate the offence to my professional pride: you want your vehicles to have faults, and you are paying me for it – who am I to argue... Sitting in an airliner and watching the little ants deep below, manufacturing, managing, machining, assembling – is their system, their company culture, functioning the same as that in „my“ car companies...?

Comparing the car manufacturers from the quality of their production and products, one of them stands out, and that is Toyota. I worked for them four times, some 9 years all up, and could not help admiring the emphasis the company puts on the quality of – of everything: from quality of their administrative procedures, their methods of design, intra-company communication, relationship with suppliers, quality of individual components right down to the finished product. In my small field of electrical system design I managed to achieve at Toyota something ALL other vehicle manufacturers were vehemently refusing to accept, and that is the acceptance of my Method of Electical System Testing.

During my second or third contract at Toyota I noticed that the finished vehicles had an unusual number of electrical faults as they were leaving the production line. I managed to wangle permission to test their electrical system BEFORE the start of production quantities.

It is true that individual electrical parts are tested, certified and guaranteed by their manufacturers. The number of manufacturers is fairly large, dozens, if not hundreds of them, let’s mention some of the better known parts: lamps, instruments, radios, air conditioning systems, engine electrics, wiring harnesses, batteries, alternators, switches, sensors, etc., etc. All of these parts are tested and guaranteed individually, BUT NOT connected together as they would be in the finished product. And that kind of test I proposed to the Company, and that kind of test I was allowed to do.

At the beginning I was helped by the radio engineer Bill Wellfer, who needed to test his radios and various speakers, together with their special cables, all connected together in spatial arrangement simulating a vehicle. From the carpenters we received a table about  2 x 5 metres, and about 1 metre high. The table was located in the engineering „playground“ area, that was a large room next to the engineering department, where the engineers are able to „play“ with their parts, and which parts can be kept there for possible future references.

The first vehicle to be thus tested had a number of variations, and I decided to test all of them .- a wishful thinking! The main variations involved 4- and 6-cylinder engine; manual and automatic transmission, several different radios and speaker arrangements; six different instrument panels; two different body styles; several arrangements of electric door locks, power windows and alarm systems; several air-conditioning systems... I ended up with some six hundred of possible variations!

To make my testing as realistic as possible I needed components that were not even made, for the production drawings of, for example, the wiring were signed off only a few weeks before – I was compelled to wait. With that waiting the time for testing ended up being compressed to some 3-4 weeks, instead of the initially required 2 months minimum. For assistance I was given two students. Bill W. also lent his hand on occasions, and we eventually managed. In the middle of it all we had visitors from Japan, a large group of men, quietly watching and taking photographs, but, being busy I was unable to spare a minute of my time for talking (none of them could speak English, and my Japanese is restricted to words they might have not liked, "kamikaze", for example).

Needless to say, that the car had no electrical faults on the start of volume production, or at any time after, in the field. Probably that was the basis of my winning further contracts with Toyota in the near future, when the more refined method was very successfully employed on the Camry – shown below - which entered volume production in 2003-2004:


                    Work on this vehicle started in 2000, soon after my contract with Kenworth was so abruptly terminated. From the onset it was done with the intention of the electrical system being fully tested well before the start of volume production. After about two years I received two side-kicks, two young electrical engineers new at Toyota. Both around 30-years old, and both with some previous experience in electrical industry: Paul T. with electrical motors, and Keith B. at Nissan in South Africa. Both were very good engineers, and very good persons at that! They eventually took the final phase of the project over, and I was able to concentrate on my testing.

                    With this vehicle, due to its many variations, I ended up with some 2000 possible combinations of electrical components. Fortunately, with the delivery of first electrical components, a young engineer, Anthony B., from wiring harness manufacturer, arrived to assist. He downloaded my 2000 combinations into his computer and managed to prune them down to some 1600-1700. With every combination he prepared large sheet of paper with the list of components required for the given test, and we were ready to start with Test Number 1. Paul T., with a well-developed dramatic sense (his parents came from Greece) prepared large board with chart of progress, on which we were recording daily output, faults found, faults fixed, etc., for the benefit of our management, for which we were praised up to Toyota’s heavens!

                    As it always happens, the components we needed were not arriving according to our plans, so, instead of starting with Test No. 1 we had to start with, say, Test No. 163, followed by Test 22., followed by Test 1234, but we managed, albeit with higher effort and slightly fogged up thinking. The three months in the company of the two, sometimes up to four, engineers and friends, remain firmly etched in my memory as the highlight of my engineering carrier.

                    Needless to say, that when the car eventually entered volume production it had no electrical faults. I left Toyota at Christmas, 2003, but soon after I heard of several of them, but none of them was of our doing: wiring harness manufacturer swapped two wires in one sensitive component in such a way that it was impossible to detect with our fairly primitive way of testing, and there was danger of the wiring causing fire in the engine compartment. Also, there was problem with batteries, which tended to lose charge after sitting in cars for many weeks during shipment to Middle Eastern countries, and they had to be replaced on arrival. Both of these problems I was aware of - and predicted in writing - on my way out of Toyota but was unable to do anything about them.

                    After Toyota I worked for a few months for a high-voltage switchboard manufacturer, also on systems of electrical energy distribution for Schneider Electric, also for General Motors again on a new Isuzu-GM commercial vehicle, and, finally, for Toyota again, this time for their Service Department on the new Camry Customer Manuals. This job I was working on from the premises of Holden Special Vehicles company, when I was present at the meeting with the Metropolitan Ambulance management. That shall be described in the next – LAST – chapter.