Ken Gratton•11 May 2013
NEWS
Land Rover's no-spark aluminium body shop
A spotless factory floor without sparks or soot? Charles Dickens would be turning in his grave...Land Rover's aluminium body shop is an exemplar for the future of automotive manufacturing.
As car companies focus more on reducing costs, reducing energy use, reducing production complexity and improving the lot of workers, a facility like the Solihull, UK plant is already at the forefront of manufacturing efficiency.
The company threw open the doors of the plant for Aussie journalists attending the 65th anniversary event last week, providing a glimpse of what's possible with a commitment to enhancing product quality and business profitability, in consonance with the environment. It was anything but the usual earnest but soporific guided tour we anticipated.
According to our guides, the building itself dates back to the 1970s, but was stripped of all its existing equipment to be refurbished for production of the new Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, both of which feature aluminium monocoque construction. Land Rover has a long history of working with aluminium for its body parts. In fact the first aluminium-bodied cars are as old as the company itself, being built from recycled aircraft parts three years after the end of the second world war.
But the inspiration and impetus for aluminium to be used as a load-bearing unitary construction (monocoque) body and chassis combined came from sister company Jaguar, which has been working with aluminium monocoques since the days of the X350 series XJ model. The material is considerably lighter than steel and can be readily extracted from its ore (bauxite), which is an abundant material that should be able to meet rising world demand for centuries to come, according to the Wikipedia entry on the subject.
Australia is the largest supplier of bauxite in the world, mining a third of the world's total production, but Land Rover plans to source its raw materials from Saudi Arabia, reducing the cost of shipping the metal to Britain. The plant also recycles aluminium off-cuts and bodies that didn't make it through final inspection, thus saving some of the cost of the raw materials.
Land Rover's body shop for Range Rover and Range Rover Sport production bonds the parts together using a combination of rivets and glue rather than the traditional (steel body) method of spot welding. Riveting saves 25 per cent of the energy normally required for conventional manufacturing reliant on spot-welding. Further energy savings result from the airflow through the building, which keeps workers cool in summer and warm in winter. No air conditioning is installed in the plant.
3172 rivets are used in each of the bodies (for both the Range Rover and the Sport), with 161 metres of glue applied also. The glue cures at 160° Celsius in the baking ovens, after each body has been painted. To keep the body together prior to the conclusion of the bonding process, the production line uses framing jigs that clamp the various parts in one unit.
According to Land Rover a new car is built every 142 seconds, with 328 robots fitting the 403 body parts. The robots are capable of detaching and fitting 'heads' to rivet different parts of the car. One head used for riveting inside the engine bay may be replaced by another to rivet under the door sills. The actual process of changing heads takes no more than about 15 seconds. With so many robots in the plant there are relatively few workers around, which might serve to explain how, during the two years the plant has been in operation there have been no accidents at all – over 1.8 million hours.
On that basis alone the plant is already a successful operation, never mind the efficiency and quality gains. That is why Land Rover is working on two new body shops at Solihull, with one due for completion shortly. The new body shop will assume responsibility for production of the Range Rover – currently in full swing at the existing facility, which will devote its full capacity to production of the Range Rover Sport once that model is released.
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Written byKen Gratton
Our team of independent expert car reviewers and journalists
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