(32) Working as a contract engineer (6/8).

A small correction: in the previous blog two names of engineers from Toyota were mentioned – incorrectly. They were not there at the time; I worked with them some two vehicles later, in 2000 – 2003.

**** and now back to the trucks I worked on in 1995 – 2000.

In 1995 our Company won a contract to design the electrical system for a few military vehicles. One of them was a multi-purpose chassis with cabin and with a Caterpillar diesel engine (one of the variations became the famous Bushmaster much later); the other was of a "jeep" type vehicle featuring a Renault engine, automatic transmission, a variety of day-and-night lamps and a platform for a variety of military shooting weapons. The design was going rather slowly for the vehicle was to be marketed around the world. Already, there were crews of engineers and mechanics from a number of countries working on it - USA, Malaysia, Israel, Australia, etc. Our Company, apart from design of the electrical system, was planning to manufacture (prototypes, initially) a number of control modules. Typical drawing of the instrument panel wiring for one of those vehicles is shown here:

    While we were busy with work and frequent travelling from our office at Croydon to Ararat (electrical systems manufacturer) and Bendigo (Australian Defence Industries) we had an offer from a truck manufacturer, Paccar Industries (Kenworth Australia).

    The company was producing trucks, from the smallest, used for special purposes, such as concrete mixer, garbage vehicle, etc., up to the largest, with their engine displacement of 19 litres. The large trucks were able to pull up to 4 trailers, fully loaded with iron ore, for example. There were several transmissions available, manual ones with up to 18 gears, and also 6-gear automatic. Engines and automatic transmissions were electronically controlled.

There were two basic types of cabins: one for the trucks with the “nose”, and the other for trucks without it. Both types of cabins were able to be extended by a “sleeper” compartment. The chassis’ length varied according to requirements. The undercarriage was from simple, one front and one rear axle, to multiple front and multiple rear axles.

  After my previous experience with batteries and alternators, and electrical systems in general, I was expecting some electrical problems – and was hit with a veritable bonanza of them!

            I was used to work around mass produced vehicles, where every electrical component is designed to the minutest detail. And not only that: the component must be tested, both mechanically and electrically, to comply with the most exact requirements. After design process is finalised the parts are evaluated by the manufacturing engineers for their suitability for mass production – how to bring them to the production line, how and where to position them, what implements are required for their handling, etc. In other words, everything must click exactly as designed and determined by the manufacturing engineers. There is hardly a shred of leeway for the production personnel.

With the trucks, and their low volume production (4 -10 trucks a day during my time there), the assembly methods were largely left to the production personnel. Design of components, and their suitability for the purpose and manufacturing was restricted to the barest minimum. Electrical compatibility of components was never looked at from the design point of view. Special components – and there were many of them – were quite often sent to the assembly line unpacked, to install in the trucks at the operators’ discretions.

  Quite often the operators had no electrical training, and if they did not understand something they were encouraged to walk into the design office to ask the electrical engineer.  Only then I understood why at Peter’s table, and from now on mine, stood a queue of several persons from the assembly floor; why his telephone kept ringing, why he kept running between his office and the assembly line: there were no drawings for the assembly to consult!

  And the time-honoured system continued on after my arrival! And what is more, I was not familiar with the details. My stock answer had to be “I am sorry, I have to find out and come and see you with the answer”. I, too, had to deal with the incessant questions, torment the telephone lines, run between my desk and the assembly line…

  A couple of weeks after my arrival I answered my telephone, and at the other end there was a driver of a cattle truck, stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere due to a faulty starter motor. He was waiting day and night already for a mechanic to bring and install a new starter motor. The driver actually did not ring because of the starter, that he considered a done thing; he was asking about something else. After answering I asked him to ring a little later. Quickly I consulted starter motor activation in his type of truck and discovered an error in the interconnection of components. When he rang later I asked him if he was able to reshuffle some wires around the starter motor. On his answering in the affirmative I asked him to grab a pair of pliers, cut some wires around the starter motor, and re-join them in a slightly different way. When he reported success I asked him to start the engine. I heard the engine coming to life, and above the din his exuberant yodelling “it’s working, mate, it’s working!!!”. I asked him to stop the mechanic from coming with the unnecessary new starter motor and wished him safe trip.

  After this experience – and many, many similar ones, I began to adapt my old trusted electrical circuit drawing to the basic electrical system of these trucks. To this circuit I added everything I came across, new components, as and when they arrived on my desk, until the entire system was thoroughly mapped out.

  I was lucky with the arrival of a new draftsman, an old Englishman, who professed to know nothing about electricity, but was willing to learn. Thank you, Morris Freeman, you learned everything, you were devil of a worker, and I would have been lost for a long time without you!

I decided to prepare for each and every new vehicle a complete set of electrical drawings, suitable for both assembly line, and for the electricians in the field. At the same time, I insisted that the assembly line is adhering to the information in these drawings, which decision, at least initially, was not very popular. The queues at my desk, however, became shorter and shorter, until they disappeared; my telephone stopped its incessant ringing, my trips to the assembly line became rarer and rarer. The reason was simple: each visitor, each caller was told to go to the foreman’s office and consult the drawings.

From my many years spent with passenger vehicles manufacturers I was familiar with their assembly halls: spotlessly clean, well-organised, components stored in neat containers along the assembly line, operators wearing uniforms, etc. The truck assembly line looked like a large automotive repair shop, and it took quite a while for me to get my bearings. I was lucky that I managed to transfer a few line operators from the workshop into the engineering office: Tony, a Filipino, draftsman; another Tony “Gumtree”, a cyclist who rode solo the Tour the France route the previous year, technician; and German T. from Chile, a design draftsman. With these three around me I finally began to feel at home.

In the desk I inherited after the “professor” I found a Manila folder containing clippings from various regional newspapers. These clippings contained articles of various truck accidents that occurred around the country, where electrical faults were the suspected “culprits”. For example, a truck ended up far in a muddy field after “losing” all the headlamps in the middle of a bend at night; a driver forced to jump from a moving truck when flames began to shoot from the instrument panel; a truck written off after a fire destroyed the entire front end… Some articles contained dramatic pictures, too.

I concentrated on the possible causes of these accidents, from electrical point of view. After my several months behind me already, I was not surprised to discover a fair number of possible causes (= faults), and not only on trucks from the past, but also on trucks I was currently working on, truck that still had vestiges of the old electrical system in them! Therefore, apart from my work on new trucks as they were passing across my desk, I began identifying faults, correcting them, and slowly trying to implement these corrections in my work.

The word “slowly” above was used deliberately, for resistance to change is always considerable, even if the change meant correction of errors, improvement of performance and savings of cost.

For example, components suppliers are obliged to store certain number of components available for use in case of urgent need. My changes were in a large degree affecting cables and junction boxes manufactured by one company. The changes, involving components that were used on many models for many years were implemented with ease even if certain modifications to manufacturing process and tooling were involved. The first problem arose when the manufacturer asked if the components in storage should be modified as well. The answer, in my mind, was obviously yes, but due to the cost involved I had to ask my management for permission. The management decided that revisions of components in storage might indicate to the customers that the components were faulty, and somebody could sue the factory for past accidents: the components in storage remained faulty…

  I received the same reply when trying to increase output of alternators. My only success was in elimination of the smallest alternators, but even the remaining largest ones, with maximum current output of 160 Amps., were inadequate, especially in trucks with several trailers, or in trucks with many non-standard electrical components. An alternator that is forced to supply power in excess of its rating for a prolonged period of time would stop functioning, in which case the only source of electrical energy remaining are the batteries, which have a fairly limited ability to do so.

My apology for the use of simple language; more details can be found in my blog  

http://cdpl1.blogspot.com.au/2007/05/alternator-in-cars.html

  And thus, I became a knowing partner of manufacture of trucks with faulty electrical system!

Still, in the meantime, I managed to rid the trucks of a great number of less obvious faults, especially faults that did not require discussion with, or permission from, the management. For example, there were no flames shooting from the instrument panels of “my” trucks; they were not “losing” headlamps in critical moments (actually never); their batteries were not “dying”, as long as their alternators were functioning; they did not have fires in the engine compartments, or anywhere else for that matter; and many others, that I considered my “consolation prices”. Most of these improvements consisted of revisions to the fusing system, and to strict adherence to selection of cable sizes according to my old electrical circuit evaluation method, developed previously over several models of passenger vehicles, and refined for the trucks.

One of my favourite models was T300 for which I was allowed to design an entirely new electrical system:

  One of the very few important things I managed to achieve was the removal of stipulation that the users of these trucks are able to modify their electrical systems as they see fit, for the system is – it was claimed – robust enough to cope with additional headlamps, driving lamps, trailers, air conditioning systems, and so on. The system was anything but robust, and each of these additional components caused the wires to overheat and melt, fuses blowing, alternators failing, etc. The stipulation was even used as an advertising gimmick – and it was false! I was not aware of it until a year or two into my tenure, and I became aware of it under fairly dramatic circumstances.

  One day I received a severe telephone dressing-down from one owner of a large number of our trucks. According to him, each time he tries to dial a number on his newly installed telephone in his trucks (this before the mobile telephone era) his engine stops. After me he administered the same dose of dressing-down to our chief engineer, who began to monster me for endangering the sale of some 20 new trucks to the same customer.

  Afterwards, a quiet investigation revealed the obvious. My tenure coincided with introduction of new generation of diesel engines, that were electronically controlled (the previous engines had purely mechanical system of control). The new engines had a number of electronic sensors on them, their injection system was electrically activated, and the whole system was controlled by a new electronic control module. Resultantly, the trucks had a large number of additional wires, new fuses, new wiring harnesses, etc. The mechanic, installing new telephones in the irate customer’s trucks, was connecting telephones using the old time-honoured method: red wire is positive, blue wire is ignition, white wire is earth. Unfortunately for him, the red and blue wires he selected from the multitude of new wires (without consulting wiring diagram!) were serving something or other in the engine management system. Thus, when the owner dialled a number on his telephone the engine management module received a false signal and promptly shut the engine down…

  From that time on the customers were not allowed to add anything to their electrical system, or modify it, without approval by the engineering department.

  The number of vehicles produced by this company during my time was about 4 – 10 per day. If the number dropped below 4 the company had to reduce the number of operators on the assembly floor. Around the end of 1999 the number dropped to about 3. There were rumours that if the number drops to 2 the reduction of the number of operators in the engineering department will follow. And, sure enough, around mid-2000 the number dropped to 2, and a few weeks later we contractors, some 25 of us, were called to the chief engineer’s office, and dismissed on the spot.

   For me, the 5 years spent with these trucks were fairly interesting. I was able to test and perfect my method of electrical system evaluation, and also to apply it in real life; I met a number of good people, both in the design and manufacturing departments, even among the managers! For one year I was the company’s golf champion – the large Cup with my name engraved on it is still on display in the cantina, I heard. The company culture rubbed against my hair, of course. By “culture” I mean the sweeping under the carpet of the numerous faults, their resistance to change no matter how justified… That “culture” is, however, endemic in the automotive industry, and I am inclined to believe that in other industries as well.