The Chop House

Automotive Manufacturing & Production, Sept, 2000 by Jeff Sabatini

There's an old football saying that goes something like this: "Three things can happen you throw the ball and two of them are bad." If you're not a football fan, you may not understand this as a metaphor for convertibles, but suffice it to say that cutting the roof off a coupe and replacing it with a folding canvas contraption opens a veritable Pandora's box. The roof can leak. The body can rattle. Terms like "fit and finish" and noise, vibration, and harshness" have a tendency to become pejorative. But just as coaches still call pass plays, automakers still build convertibles. Because when everything goes right, there's nothing more exciting than cruising around with the top down (football excepted).

I survey the small warehouse-like plant in Kitchener, Ontario, where ASC Inc. is turning Toyota Camry Solara coupes into ragtops. From where I'm standing I can see the entire operation spread out in front of me, from the roar of the Sawzall tearing into steel to the downpour of the water test station. When it was explained to me in the conference room, the process seemed pretty simple: start with a coupe, cut off its top, weld in structural reinforcements, add a convertible top, and tie up the loose ends on the interior. Voila summer fun.

But now that I've stepped out onto the floor with my tour-guide-for-the-day, the guy who actually makes this "simple" process happen, every day, my initial impression is more along the lines of: "Convertibles are a royal pain in the $*! to build..."

Interrupting my thought, this guy--plant manager Don Kushmaul--tugs at my arm. He wants to show me the fixtures that his people are using to assemble the top. He tells me that this Solara top, with its "floating five-bow," is the most sophisticated design that ASC has ever used. He should know, as it was this project that brought him back from California, where he had been managing the ASC facility that had built Celica convertibles for Toyota since 1983.

More than just building a new top, this new plant is, as Kushmaul describes it, fundamental to "the evolution of the relationship" between ASC and Toyota. In fact, ASC is working for an entirely different part of Toyota, with an entirely different philosophy. This begets a different, two-stage process for this chop shop, which means that Kushmaul et al. are learning just how challenging simplicity can really be.

Meet the New Boss

As you might expect from a Midwesterner-turned-Californian who's now doing the bidding of a Japanese company located in Canada, Don Kushmaul has a rather different attitude toward his life and work than most. I ask him if he regrets having to move away from sunny SoCal. He replies: "I didn't like living out there for a long time. Then about the time I started to like it, I came back."

Perhaps I'm reading too much into a mere statement of fact, but there is a certain temperament that's necessary to deal with a Japanese manufacturing company, something that Kushmaul had not done prior to his move to Ontario. See, when he was in California, he used to get those Celicas directly from Toyota in Japan. They'd come off the boat as coupes and his crew would do their magic Transformer act, turning ready-for-sale coupes into ready-for-sale convertibles. ASC's customer for these vehicles was actually Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. (TMS), a very American company (think of customers jumping up in the air and shouting, "I love what you do for me..."). Point being, TMS didn't particularly care how ASC was making these cars, just that it did it and did it good. Which, by most assessments, it did. But then the Celica convertible was discontinued...but that's another story entirely.

When it was decided that ASC would get the contract to build the annual run of 6,000 Solara convertibles, it was also decided that they would do it in a new facility about 15 km from Cambridge, Ontario, where the Solara coupes are made at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc. (TMMC). TMMC, of course, has a decidedly different outlook on building cars than TMS. As Kushmaul says, "They have kind of taken us to school, so to speak, helping ASC take the next step in manufacturing."

Canadians Say Pro-cess

This "next step" involves making the process more efficient by reducing the waste inherent in cutting up a complete car. To this end, a coupe body that is destined to become a convertible actually begins its transformation in the TMMC body shop, where the first of many structural reinforcements are added. But rather than heading from body shop to paint shop, it gets wheeled off the TMMC line on a dolly and into the back of an 18-wheel freight hauler, the trailer of which has been modified with a track down its center. No fancy material handling system here, just a simple and inexpensive modification to existing equipment that allows one semi to carry three coupe bodies to ASC, and three convertible bodies upon its return.

The coupe body remains on this same dolly as it is manually wheeled through the ASC body shop, where it gets attached to fixtures so that more reinforcements can be welded in and the roof can be cut off. Of note is the fact that ASC is now fixturing the bodies off the door opening rather than the B-pillar, resulting in better fit and finish by decreasing the number of adjustments that need to be made to get the doors and windows to fit snugly. This is just one of many error-proofing techniques that were developed with Toyota's assistance.