I finished
at Mitsubishi in January, 1993. After a few weeks at home I received
a 'phone call from Peter H., whom I met on a few occasions
at meetings with suppliers for Mitsubishi; Peter used to turn up at these
meetings representing some trucking company. On the 'phone I was told that
he heard I was free from Mitsubishi, and would I be interested in
a job as a design draftsman for KW truck where he was Chief
Electrical Engineer. Having nothing else lined up I agreed. At the
previous meetings I called him Professor, for everybody else was addressing
him so. At KW, to my astonishment, I discovered that the nickname –
as I took it to be – was true to form: on the nameplate above his desk was
his full name, Prof. Dr. Eng. Peter H. Wow! I stopped calling him
professor and restricted myself to the more common way of addressing him as Peter.
I started
there as a draftsman in April, 1993. For work they had new computers
whose brand name now escape me. Their system was somewhat different from those
I used before and it took me a day or two to understand their tricks.
The
factory manufactured large trucks, mostly designed to pull trailers, one, two,
up to four trailers, sometime even more. Size of these trucks can be guessed at by
the size of their engines – diesels, with 8 to about 20 litres of displacement.
At the time of my start Kenworth was doing away with the mechanically injected
engines, and began to use engines with electronic fuel injections. That EFI
system was even a bit more complicated than the one I was used to
from my work on passenger vehicles previously.
Alongside
my work I could not help myself looking at these trucks from my electrical
point of view. The first glance was rather surprising! I always start with
the evaluation of alternator and battery sizes. A quick calculation of
electrical current requirement at the common high-electrical-demand continuous operating
conditions (engine working, air conditioning working, external lamps turned on,
a couple of trailers behind, etc.) gave me a figure well in excess of
200 Amps. electrical current requirement. Alternators on these trucks were able
to deliver between 60 and 160 Amps. electrical current maximum! A quiet
inquiry with the Service Department revealed that the electrical components
suffering from greatest number of failures are – alternators and batteries!
Hardly surprising, for alternators fail when they are subjected to continuous
demand above their rated capacity, with the battery failures following closely behind.
Inquiring
with Peter’s sidekick, a young electrical engineer N. C., confirmed to me what
I suspected: that in a motor vehicle the main electrical power
supplier is the battery, with the alternator serving as a battery charger
only! It happens to be exactly the other way round, but I thanked him for
the information, being but a general draftsman...
As
the time went by I discovered quite a number of dubious electrical things until
I decided (for myself) that the electrical system in the company is in
fairly incompetent hands and decided to seek contract somewhere else. As it
happened, Toyota was looking for someone to assist their electrical engineer
with the design of the electrical system for the car being prepared for
production, and I accepted the job.
KW
people expressed disappointment: „Don’t you like it here? “. As a matter
of fact I didn’t, and we parted ways amicably.
At
my new place the local electrical engineer Trevor J. quietly confided in me
that he is not extremely keen on the electrical system, and could
I concentrate on that while he would be doing the administrative side, that
is parts list, releases, contact with the local Japanese engineers and such:
nothing could be more pleasing to me than that!
I spent
two periods of very pleasant time, working on two successive models of Camry:
The white Toyota Camry was also marketed as GM Apollo.
Trevor
J. turned out to be a very pleasant friend and a colleague, and we
managed to steer both models through all the phases of design, development and
testing to a successful start of production. Very successful, except for
one minor blemish: the first of the two models, the white one pictured above,
had quite a few electrical problems at the start of the production. Very few – if any – were caused by our design. Majority were caused by faults
in manufacture, mainly in the manufacture of wiring harnesses. In my judgment
at the time, the parts, hundreds of different parts, were manufactured and
tested individually by their manufacturers. The problems arose when parts from different
factories were assembled together in a vehicle. We both humbly accepted
the opprobrium heaped on us by the management (despite of the fact that only a tiny
minority of electrical problems were our fault), and decided to invent some
sort of testing of the electrical system prior to the start of production.
With
the second model our roles, Trevor’s and mine, were separated officially, and I was
to a large extent on my own. Parallel with my main work I began to
design some sort of electrical system testing.
For
testing I asked for a large table to be installed in the engineering
department’s storeroom. On the table I put
as many standard car components as I was able: battery, engine bay
electrical components, instrument panel, door locks and window motors, radios,
headlamps and tail lamps, etc. All these components I connected together
with wiring harnesses as they were being made available from pre-production
runs. And then I started creating various situations...
Electrically
speaking, the car was not one, but several hundred of slightly different
vehicles. For starters, the car came with two different engines, four- and a six-cylinder
one; manual and automatic transmission; several different air conditioning
systems; a number of electric windows options, door locks options and
alarm system options; several different radio and speakers arrangements, to
name but few. When I connected (on paper) all these different arrangements I ended up with several hundreds of tests. Despite having one colleague
(radio engineer Bill W.) on hand to assist the task was beyond me. I asked for some
assistance from the testing department, but was given (for some 5 weeks only)
two university students, on leave from their 4th year of electrical
engineering.
Of
the two, Carmen turned up to be like supercharged dragon at work: understood
the task at the first glance, was ready to start interconnecting and testing
almost immediately, and even, after a couple of weeks started coming up
with improvements and most welcome simplifications – mind, I myself was
still only wrestling with the job... Fernando (both of their parent were of
Spanish origin) was a bit slower, but the three of us managed to „de-bug“
the electrical system so that the start of production happened without a hitch.
Thank you, Carmen, thank you Fernando...
I still
had a few weeks of work at Toyota left on my desk when I received a surprising
telephone call from Kevin D., Human Resources Manager at KW: „Charles,
how much longer are you planning to stay at Toyota?“. I told him that it
could be a month or two. „O. K., can you start as an electrical engineer here
at KW, when you finish? “. After agreeing on the conditions and on the
salary I promised to give him a ring.
Three
weeks later my desk at Toyota was clear, I reported back to Kevin, and a few days later on Monday, I reported to Gary
H., the Chief Engineer at KW. He took me to the „Professor’s“ table,
wished me good luck and went back to his glass office. Turning to Peter’s assistant,
the electrical engineer N. C., I asked about Peter: „He left last Friday“,
was the surprising answer. And what am I supposed to do, I asked? „The
same as Peter, and I now have batteries and brakes“, answered N. C.
And
that was the start of my 5-years long carrier at KW...
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