Every station on the line
The way into a production line is whatever station is open. The way to improve one is all of them.
The stuck thing
Morgan builds truck bodies and mounts them on finished chassis: long seasonal runs of moving trucks for Ryder and Penske alongside one-off stake beds, refrigerated boxes, and custom builds with liftgates and side doors. Work moves station to station, and so do defects. From inside any single position, quality problems look like someone else’s. The line as a whole belongs to nobody.
The diagnosis
Start at the bottom and learn everything. The first job was the dirtiest on the line: undercoating floors for 14-foot moving trucks from a dolly, tar spray head to toe. Welding earned the way up: joins across thicknesses, joint types, and positions (overhead the hardest), learned in shop courses and an engineering school’s machine shop. Stations covered: the subframe jig that starts every body, flooring, sidewalls, radius and corner caps, roofing, roll-up door installation and tuning, and mount bay, where body meets chassis. Overhead welds hung the mudflaps. An aptitude for clean, even welds on thin galvanized sheet meant long runs at the rear door frame jig, the one station whose welds stay visible under finish paint.
Made it go
Every position on the line in the first year. Night shift run past quota. Rework and collision repair, which is where you learn how bodies fail and therefore how they hold together. Forklift runs and cycle counting for inventory control. Then appointment to the Quality Committee: improving the processes from inside them, which by then was the only place I had ever seen them from. A year and a half, two desert summers in full leathers, and the shop discipline that kept eyes, lungs, and hearing for the decades of making that came after.
welding · production assembly · rework & repair · inventory control · process improvement
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