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The pessimist sees the glass half empty and the optimist sees it half full. The engineer, of course, sees the glass as being twice as big as it has to be.

Then there's the Lawrenceburg, Tenn., glass encapsulation plant of Dura Automotive. Folks there see the glass as being exactly where they want it when they want it--to sequence exactly with the build schedule for Ford's Louisville and St. Louis assembly plants. Lawrenceburg is said to be the largest window encapsulation plant in the world.

The plant produces sliding windows for pickup trucks, quarter windows with lights and lift gate assemblies at a volume of approximately 480,000 units per year.

The lift gate assemblies for Ford's Explorer, Mountaineer and Aviator are produced on an In-Line Vehicle Sequence System (ILVS) that matches up exactly with Ford's build sequence at Louisville and St. Louis. It ships between four to eight truck loads of liftgates per day to those plants.

Because of the variety of colors available on those vehicles, and the different glass tints, as well as badge specific appliques, there is currently a matrix of 106 lift gate combinations that Dura builds for Ford's SUVs. The system is capable of handling up to 200 different combinations.

Denzil Abney, director of engineer, Eddie Haygood, manufacturing engineer, Mike Roberson, process engineer, and Allison Sanders, production scheduler, all Dura employees at Lawrenceburg, explained the system to us.

Lawrenceburg provides PVC and RIM encapsulation for other customers also including Chrysler, Nissan, Honda, Subaru and GM. For the Explorer, Mountaineer and Aviator, the lift gates are all RIM encapsulations.

The ILVS program was launched in February 2000 for the Explorer/Mountaineer vehicles and then later extended to the lower volume Lincoln Aviator. Lawrenceburg produces on the order of 10,000 lift gates per week for Explorer/Mountaineer versus 600-700 per week for the Aviator. There's a separate high volume line and low volume line.

"The Aviator lift gate is supplied only to St. Louis, but the Explorer lift gate is supplied to St. Louis and Louisville," explained Abney. "The Explorer line is a large one with one segment of it dedicated to St. Louis and another segment to Louisville."

# posted by Medical Information : 3:13 AM