Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1970's

.. E • ~ t ~ rO'l .-; 0 C'I >~ co;l = c:: co;l "J • .. • Day two York Pennsylvania-Harley-Davidson The Allegheny Airlines "Sardine Special" from Washington D. C. to Harrisburg, .Pa. (nearest airport) discharges its cramped rumpled .. cargo an d almo st on cue, she ets of rain begin to slan t down. It's something of a homecoming. Fifteen years ago , York,Pennsylvania 30 was just a place, another rain -swep t bottleneck on the hitch-hike pipeline between Yirginia college and upper Pennsylvania girlfriend. Now it's where AM F builds Harleys in a converted naval weapons plant that covers 800,000 square feet of m an ufac tu ring and warehouse facilities un der roof. As you enter the long, white ad ministration building, the ancestry of the place be com es readily apparent, as the halls are that same antiseptic tw o-t one gree n that has decorate d (?) every Federal facility buil t since so mebody boug ht all th at paint. American Machine & Foundry (AMF), H·D's parent congl omerate, acqu ire d the place at a righ te o us price when the government decided to dump several excess w ar plants in 1964. Since th en , the pl ace has produced bowling pinsetters, go lf carts for the Re creation Products Division, plus bits and pie ces to support AMF's other defense co ntr ac t work. When the : bowling equipment and golf cart m ar kets began to saturate , the co rpora te he irarchy took a good hard look at ex p an ding motorcy cle output, which fo r the big Harl eys, has historically lagged behind cu stomer dem and. The "go" de cision to co nvert the plant to motorcycle assembly came in May , 1972. The co un try was in the midst of an economic binge, running up agains t sh or tages, long lead times, and con tractors wh o said, "Sure, call us back in tw o years, when we 're not busy. " After being jacked around on schedules and costs un til their patience wore thin, the York p lant managemen t said, in effect, "Screw it, we'll do it o urselv es. " They turned part of th eir workfo rce into a bunch of steelhands, fitters and millwrights. They did things like rent a gian t crane, drop the entire ele ctro static pain t line piece by p iece through th e roo f and close the building over it. They literally rais ed th e roo f of the main buildi ng, restr uc tu ring the ste el framework so it would support tons qL overhe ad inven tory storage. By mid·January 1973, th ey had hung th e las t 8,00 0 pound cross beam and welded it in pla ce. The co ncep t of overhead mon o rai l conveyo r systems for assemb ly and p arts storage had been ap proved in October '72. By April '7 3 , they were running the first test article s on the pro d u ctio n line. By heavyweigh t su mmer · they were phasing down motorcycle assembly operations in Milwaukee. By ye ar 's end, they had bu ilt over 25,000 motorcycles in th e new p lan t and th e Milwaukee line was sh ut d own totally . T oda y, all of th e V vtwin engines and transmissions are m ade and assembled in Milwaukee, th en sh ipped to York. The two-stroke sing les are still mad e in Var ese, Italy at the Aermacchi facility there. When lightweight sales are good, the Italian engines are shipped to York, wh ere the complete motorcycle is built and asse mbled on the ligh tweigh t line. Right now, with a depressed dirt bike market, all the ligh tweigh t models are being made in Italy and the York lightweight line is sh ut do wn . To visualize the layou t, H-D plant engi neers built a th ree-dim ensional scale model of the p lan t in an up per r oom of the office building. It can show in a glance things it would take severa l flat drawings to define, and then only after careful study. Basica lly, it helps ensure th at two vita l pie ces of machinery don't wind up encro aching on each other's headspace after the en gineers said th ey 'd fit. It also makes a ne at sh owpiece fo r visi ting rep orters , an d helps a visitor orient h imse lf: fo r once in th e plant, direction and position within th e overall scheme often ge t lost in a fo rest of machinery. In the overall view, work flows in fits and starts from one end of the main high-bay building, wh er e Receiving Inspection p uts raw mat er ials and bo ug ht-out parts in to th e sy ste m. to the U-sha pe d fin al asse mbly co nveyo r line at the far end. Once do wn in th e m iddle of i t, however, the macro-view be comes micro - and parts seem to move in a rando m p attern be twe en work cen ters. These centers, or departme n ts, are by machine ty p e and gro uped ca pability . For instance. all large capaci ty hydrau lic presses are gro upe d in one area, all en gine lathes that accept lo ng ski n ny parts in anoth er area, all sm all overhead-crank-t ype presses in all the multi-station a n o t her, drilling/milling machines over here , and the numeric all y - controlled Milwaukee-matics over there. Of the 2500 line items (sepa rate par ts) in th e motorcycle parts-con trol system, maybe 1500 of th em are processed through Brake , Press and Shear an d/or th e machining are a. The parts travel in five fo ot cu bic bins mo unted on forklift ski ds , carried in seq ue nce between oper ations by a fleet of propane-burning fo rk trucks. A "lot" of parts in it s ski d may weigh anywhere fr om a few hundred pounds to a couple tons . They may bo unce allover the pl ant as their operation sequence di ctates, bend here, mill there, drill across the aisle - but inexorably, th ey move toward a rendezvous w ith the assemb ly line. On the floor, with a blue oily haze hanging in the clanging, ringing air and the grey light slanting across the high bay areas overhead , parts flow seems indeed random, in a classic (stoch as tic) pattern of work/schedule/flow/sequence among work stations w hich mu st be "solved" d aily for greatest efficiency by a team of some two-dozen material and production con trol specialists. Sin ce money is tigh t and · large machine tools aren't cheap, each machin e m u st do several jobs . (Each machine must be large en ough to handle the largest job, precise enough to handle the smallest th at might be expected of it . Some of the machinery look s old enough to have come with the deal when the co mp an y bought the war plant; others are brand new, reflect ing latter-day automation tec hn ology.] Key to making one machine do several jobs is tooling. When t he schedulers in the fron t office are doing their job, th e p lant floor will know days ahead that a certain machine will run, say , a multiple drilling j o b on a cer tain part nu mber. Keyed to that p art an d th at operation is a "ki t" of every thing ne eded: th e j ig or clam p ing fix ture to hold the part, the drill bits to cu t it, the q ui ck-change fixtu res to hold the drills, m aybe even co mp lete mu lti-spind le head precisely se t u p in th e toolroo m an d ready to bolt in to th e paren t machine. If the drills are lon g and sk in ny, the jig will have drill bus hings set in it to pro te ct the drills against breakage an d act as an ex tr a support to gu ide th e drill poin ts exactly whe re th ey must go. lf a part is big an d has a multiple sequence o f similar op erat ions, as in the mas sive forged st eel (C I 022, a low-carbon all oy) f re e-m achining steering head fo r the F LH, a whole wo rk center will be designed around it . For this part several large holes must penetrate th e so lid st eel; the 1.5-inch-pl us diameter hole for the steering spindle must go clear through, as there are no core holes in the solid fo rging. For this job, H-D designed and built a special multi-st at io n machini ng center from scratch , using basic machine components. A wo rker loads a raw forging in to its hold ing fixture, clamps it do wn, set the ma chine running, then has time to service five o th er m ach ines th at cu t th e othe r holes, spo tface an d /or co un te rb ore w hile th e first one is runn ing is aut o matic cutting sequence. It's a more co mplex res ponsibility than the average person's concept of facto ry work (twist o ne nut, then twist another jus t like it), but at least at York on th is day , running 180 bikes a day w hen the plant capacity is over 300, th e p ace is not killing. a

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