Leadership to Collins

Today was Leadership Class and it was city and county day. So, we had visitors from the governing bodies.

Afterwards, we went on tours to three different businesses. My tour was to Collins Industries, where they build school busses. Bryce, the gentleman giving us the tour, gave me permission to take some photos. I've never been to a manufacturing plant, so it was interesting.

One of the most interesting things he said was that the side panels on busses are actually glued on. The rivets don't really hold them in place. It's a glue made my Loctite, and they use about six tubes for each small bus. The tubes are about the size of caulk.




There were nine people in our tour group, including Wanda on her crutches. She was quite the trooper and there was a lot of walking inside a large plant.




They make different kinds of busses - from small ones to large ones. The white ones are generally used by child care facilities. They customize them to order - nothing is built in advance. They make 23 different kinds of busses, but there are 1300 different kinds of customization they can do.




They have a sophisticated system to keep track of how much effort goes into each part of the process. Just an aside, the yellow paint is more expensive to do than the white, but they don't charge extra. You just can't charge extra for yellow paint on a school bus. It wouldn't be right.