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Looking through some old pics and found these taken at Rover, Longbridge in the mid 80's, thought they may be of interest.
Overview of the Metro 5 door build line built by British Federal in Dudley.
Door outer skin loaded and sealant applied.
Multi-weld station where various brackets, stiffeners etc. were spot welded to the inner panel. Funny bit: when it was commissioned, the engineers were getting no feedback on the pneumatic cylinder positions, turns out someone had left off a vital /M on the part numbers when ordering so all the cylinders had to be replaced with versions that the sensors could detect.
First press tool that clinched the outer skin to 45° then it transferred into the second press tool for the final 90° clinch. When Honda collaborated with Rover in the 90's they bought in single presses that used a clever cam system to rock the 45° tooling in then out before the final 90° tooling finished the job in one stroke.
The line was designed to build all the doors so each set of tooling was colour coded and we would swap it between the day and night production shifts, it would normally take us about an hour.
One of the fitters backing the next set of tooling up to the 90° press station. Left of the pic shows the board production use to tell us which set of tooling they want next (LHR - Left Hand Rear)
My mate demonstrating how big the spot welding robots were, he was 5'9" for scale.
Of course we were really busy on night shift one of the fitters made his wife a sewing box.
Overview of the Metro 5 door build line built by British Federal in Dudley.
Door outer skin loaded and sealant applied.
Multi-weld station where various brackets, stiffeners etc. were spot welded to the inner panel. Funny bit: when it was commissioned, the engineers were getting no feedback on the pneumatic cylinder positions, turns out someone had left off a vital /M on the part numbers when ordering so all the cylinders had to be replaced with versions that the sensors could detect.
First press tool that clinched the outer skin to 45° then it transferred into the second press tool for the final 90° clinch. When Honda collaborated with Rover in the 90's they bought in single presses that used a clever cam system to rock the 45° tooling in then out before the final 90° tooling finished the job in one stroke.
The line was designed to build all the doors so each set of tooling was colour coded and we would swap it between the day and night production shifts, it would normally take us about an hour.
One of the fitters backing the next set of tooling up to the 90° press station. Left of the pic shows the board production use to tell us which set of tooling they want next (LHR - Left Hand Rear)
My mate demonstrating how big the spot welding robots were, he was 5'9" for scale.
Of course we were really busy on night shift one of the fitters made his wife a sewing box.