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| Picture Post: Fiero Suspension Arm Dimensional Gages I Designed For Pontiac / Entech (Page 2/5) |
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CampyBob
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FEB 18, 08:45 PM
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Data. What engineer doesn't love data? Whole railroad cars full of boxes and boxes of data!
After all, GM, Entech, Pontiac and Teledyn Monarch plus my little company were all on a quest to build the most dimensionally perfect suspension arms the world has ever seen. I mean, Enzo, eat your stupid tubular welded pieces of pipe arm! We can haz Chevette parts robbed right from another GM parts bin and no one will ever know...right?
We were also in search of the best booze in Pontiac, Michigan and the joint that had the best looking gals dancing for us.
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LornesGT
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FEB 18, 08:48 PM
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hyperv6
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FEB 18, 08:50 PM
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Thanks for posting!
I was just in Hartville to the hardware. I live in The Clinton area.
There were several ties to the Fiero in the area. The Tires and wheels were tested by Goodyear at the tech center in Akron. The sheet molded parts were designed by Gentec and some were made in Mogadore near your company. Motor Wheel also did some testing on composite wheels that were never used. They were part of Goodyear.
PPG in Strongsville did work on several of the show cars and pace cars.
My friend did the tire design and testing for the Fiero.
Akron had many suppliers in that era.[This message has been edited by hyperv6 (edited 02-18-2020).]
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CampyBob
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FEB 18, 08:54 PM
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OK...last pic for the night. Time for bed. I did 21 miles on Zwift before doing this and my butt is dragging. Yeah, the 'Campy' in Campybob comes from the Campagnolo components on my bicycles. 47 years a roadie.
I'll add some more pics tomorrow hopefully. Man, this is bringing back some memories! Can it really have been 35 years ago?!
Here you can see one of the 'Y' arms that turned the lowly little Chevette arm into something magic that turned our Fiero's into cars capable of pulling 2 G's on the skid pad and diving under a Lotus Super 7! At least that's what the GM sales reps with the Platinum cards told the strippers.
Hey...I still have that old document satchel! I should eBay it or maybe put it in the For Sale forum here...Fiero history, baby! Who'll give me a fiddy?
 [This message has been edited by CampyBob (edited 02-19-2020).]
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CampyBob
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FEB 18, 09:00 PM
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| quote | Originally posted by hyperv6:
Thanks for posting!
I was just in Hartville to the hardware. I live in The Clinton area.
There were several ties to the Fiero in the area. The Tires and wheels were tested by Goodyear at the tech center in Akron. The sheet molded parts were designed by Gentec and some were made in Mogadore near your company. Motor Wheel also did some testing on composite wheels that were never used. They were part of Goodyear.
PPG in Strongsville did work on several of the show cars and pace cars.
My friend did the tire design and testing for the Fiero.
Akron had many suppliers in that era. |
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Very cool! I'm from Minerva. At the time of the project I was living in Canton and a member of the Stark County Bicycle Club and Sirak Financial racing Team. We trained a lot in the Canal Fulton / Clinton area...Nimi Reservoir, Rogue's Hollow...all that area.
Familiar with both Entech and Gentec. Never heard of Motor Wheel. I'll have to Google them. The Pontiac test track was awesome and there was always new sleds and mules to check out, plus the factory had literally hundreds of Fiero's you could just hop in and drive from point A to point B on the grounds if you were authorized. They had large 3-digit numbers stenciled on the doors and all of them were either red Fiero's or white ones.[This message has been edited by CampyBob (edited 02-19-2020).]
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CampyBob
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FEB 18, 09:03 PM
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Forgot to add, KIKO Auctions is selling off the old factory in front of the tow motor wheel and tire plant Teledyne use to operate that's now a cement slab...after Trelleborg bought that division. Maybe Cooper was also involved once upon a time. The stamping plant was closer to Hartville on a side road. I think it still stands, but is no longer a Teledyne fascility.
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CampyBob
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FEB 18, 09:06 PM
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| quote | Originally posted by Thunderstruck GT:
Very cool!
I have an original blueprint that may have been used for those gages.
Give me a bit and I'll see if I can get a good picture. |
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Do it! I want to see it! Take a close up of the title block...I want to see my initials so I know banging my head on my drawing board (pre-CAD days!) and doing all those calculations in reverse Polish notation on my HP calculator wasn't just a bad dream!
Original drawings should be tech pen / ink on grid line Mylar.[This message has been edited by CampyBob (edited 02-18-2020).]
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pmbrunelle
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FEB 18, 11:53 PM
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Do you happen to know why the front lower control arm bushings are not collinear with each other?
Did Teledyne Monarch deliver control arms with bushings and ball joints pressed in? Could the inspection gages only work with bushings and ball joints installed?
I'm guessing that allowing the customer to press in these parts themselves would lead to them deforming the control arms, failing to assemble them on the car, and then blaming the supplier for their troubles.
Piles of dimensional data are useless... until you have a problem and you need to understand what's going on, or you have a recall to do... Data like this is kind of like an insurance policy.
Since you're implying that the data didn't serve much purpose, I guess you didn't have many problems with these parts![This message has been edited by pmbrunelle (edited 02-18-2020).]
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CampyBob
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FEB 19, 06:13 AM
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| quote | Originally posted by pmbrunelle:
Do you happen to know why the front lower control arm bushings are not collinear with each other?
Did Teledyne Monarch deliver control arms with bushings and ball joints pressed in? Could the inspection gages only work with bushings and ball joints installed?
I'm guessing that allowing the customer to press in these parts themselves would lead to them deforming the control arms, failing to assemble them on the car, and then blaming the supplier for their troubles.
Piles of dimensional data are useless... until you have a problem and you need to understand what's going on, or you have a recall to do... Data like this is kind of like an insurance policy.
Since you're implying that the data didn't serve much purpose, I guess you didn't have many problems with these parts!
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1. No clue, but assume it had to do with NVH during articulation. Later versions of the arm were coaxial pickup hard points.
2. Arms were shipped with bushings shot in and ball joints installed (with rivets IIRC). Gaging was done with precision ground and hardened steel slip fit and straight wall expanding mandrel arbor type faux bushings. This gave precise hole size measurements on the diameters and hole location. You can see these details in the pictures...sorry about the poor quality. No digital cameras back then. Some of the straight wall (parallel) expanding types had an LVDT that converted linear travel to diameter read. We did measure with actual bushings shot in place on assemblies, but no effort was made to check the pivot hole size or location as the holes had a mile of clearance and measuring location in rubber was not advisable. If it fit on the chassis going down the assembly line...close enough.
3. True, but whenever the buyer could get an assembly that was complete to bolt on the car that was a time and money saver. Outsourced labor was always cheaper.
4.There were lots and lots of problems, including multiple shut-downs of the assembly line. Although data was stored on the tiny hard drive, 5-1/4" floppies (remember those?!) and off-loaded to a main frame in addition the reams and reams of tractor paper that ended up right back in the boxes the black paper was shipped in and stashed away in a storage room until the part ceased production no one ever referred to it. Got a problem? Solve it the quick, cheap and expedient way...alter the die, bend the part, open the hole up, make the hole smaller, slow the press SPM down, change the weld sequence, etc. Old school.
5. Development is always tricky with stampings. Steel doesn't always obey the lines on a paper drawing when it comes out of a prog die running 60 SPM. The part stamping drawings were pencil on vellum. Lots of erasures and re-designs. Literally, the mantra was make it fast, make it cheap, make it work. It's just a banged out piece of sheet metal going on a car that would be in a scrap yard in 10 years. No one ever expected the suspension arms or the cars to have dedicated collectors and internet forums in 1985. The internet wasn't even available back then. And the Fiero was basically an 'economy car'. GM only green lighted production if Pontiac could build it cheaply, using as much already existing GM parts off the shelves as possible. They did a great job considering what they had to work with![This message has been edited by CampyBob (edited 02-19-2020).]
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Cliff Pennock
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FEB 19, 09:10 AM
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Hi Bob!
Great pictures! And welcome to the forum!
Sorry for the ads appearing in your posts (or do they only appear for me?). I had enabled "Automatic Ad Optimization" in Google Adsense but Google placed ads in the weirdest of places - like in the middle of your posts. I have disabled it but (at least on my end) I'm still seeing the ads. Hopefully they'll disappear soon.
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