Volkswagen-Kassel

Ahhhhh, the as-promised last post about my Car Weekend!!!


It all ended on Monday, two very short days ago. The entire foreign-exchange group here (whom I've befriended pretty much every member, by the way...we are all so close!!) was invited to ride out to Baunatal, a suburb of Kassel, where the 2nd largest VW manufacturing plant in all of the VW company is located.

The plant employees 14,000 citizens from the Baunatal/Kassel area, working the assembly lines for gearboxes, car doors, and fenders for the VW Passat and Golf models.

aka: this trip was TOTALLY COOL, and I am one happy camper to say that my pilgrimages to all the car heavens started and finished with Volkswagen stuff!

(Which is good, since I actually felt like I was cheating on Volkswagen by journeying out to Stuttgart on Saturday to see Porsche and Mercedes.)

Prior to leaving, everyone in the exchange program was joking around with me about how jovial of a day it was going to be. Joe came up to me and teased that he was surprised I even showed up to the tram stop, that he figured I was going to skip class that day since it was "nothing important." Others coyly smiled and admitted, "I knew you'd be the first one here to flag us all down and make sure we got there." Carthik also gave me some flak, after I took a picture of the train station stop, since it said "VW Werk" on it in big letters. Ha ha...it was a cool, humbling day. Finally a chance for me to come out of the woodwork and others to recognize me and my hobbies.

We all took the S-bahn out to Baunatal after lunch, and hopped off to walk the looooong blacktopped driveway, past the security gates, and past all the outgoing railroad tracks, where trains come and leave with parts or partially-assembled vehicles.

We approached the VW-Kassel building, and it was HUGE. We later found out the stats that it is over 1 km in length, with four warehouses all connected together by hallways and covered catwalks, that are each .5 km in depth.

The entire building was made of brick, with blue letters sitting on the rooftop that looked just like the H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D letters poking out of the side of the hills out in Los Angeles, CA. instead, these letters spelled out V-O-L-K-S-W-A-G-E-N.

In the far distance (basically, that 1 km away) on the upper left corner of the roof, was the VW lollipop.

What is a lollipop, you ask? I learned over here that in the car world, it is the car insignia, usually a huge circle that is perfectly round and put up on display on the outside of the car building. It sits on top of a pole, a stainless steel-lookin' one. The pole itself is bolted to the roof of the building, and spins the circular-sign around so high in the sky, that the whole town can see it like it is some North Star.

Big circle on top of a stick: you get a lollipop.

:)


We got all checked in (beforehand, I had my buddy from Tulane University...the Harvard engineering college of the south...take some pictures of me hugging the ground-level VW sign, advertising the dealership there by the factory plant, hee hee), and just like the case was in Wolfsburg, we were prohibited from taking pictures of the top-secret factory we were about to explore. So, I have no pictures of the inside of this building. :(

We started out by entering the building and sitting down for an hour in a large, ballroom-dancing-room sized hall, to listen to a Power Point presentation by a guy named Wolfgang (gee, ya think he is German??? Ha!). The Power Point was really interesting, and I wish I had thought sooner to take notes on the slides...but by the time I thought about it, we only had like 10 minutes left of the presentation. Crap.

Anyway, the presentation was all about Volkswagen, and its 32 plants worldwide. Wolfy gave us the whole rundown on which plants in which countries produced which models of the VW...as well as the Audis, Skodas, Seats, Bentleys, Bugattis, and the Italian exotics, Lamborghinis. :) :)

Wolfy told us about women in the engineering and manufacturing workforce, which I found particularly interesting and motivating. Right now 10.9% of the 14,000 employees at VW-Kassel are women, and the percentage is increasing quickly, year by year.

Apparently, every single employee that works at VW, only got there after surviving and passing a 3-year apprenticeship with the company, practicing welding, assembly line safety, and basic warehousing maintenance. Wah, that surely beats the requirements of Marion Body Works, whom require every one of their fire truck assemblers to go through their private welding class, which only lasts 8 weeks!

The factory inside was HUGE. (Gosh, every car thing I have been mentioning here has been 'HUGE,' but I am serious and not exaggerating!!)

It was two stories tall, and like I said, 1 km by .5 km, easily. We started out touring the first floor, and it was amazing!!

The coordination, the robots, the timing of the conveyor belts and forging machines...it was like synchronized swimming, I could have stood there and stared at the line ups forever!

One robot would mash the raw material (sheets of aluminum and steel), send it up a conveyor belt, where two robot arms would pinch the steel, then reach up and over the robot's "head" and hand off the steel from its hands to another waiting robot's hands, just perfectly offset and bolted into the floor a perfect distance away from the first robot. That way, neither one of the robots' arms were out of reach for each other!

The robots would set the material down, CNC-laser machines would feverishly carve out a design with excellent, impeccable results, and send the cut and extruded material down the conveyor belt to a bin where a Volkswagen employee would be there, just casually making sure all the parts stacked up evenly in a bin. The machines were doing the rest of the work for him.

Wolfy walked us around the whole factory, with a microphone to speak into, over the LOUD noise of the manual labor going on all around us. We each were given these blue walkie-talkie looking things, with headphones plugged into it. The walkie-talkies were set on the same frequency of Wolfy's microphone, so we could hear in our headphones what he was explaining to us, even while standing yards away from a forging machine that was making enough grunting noise to pass for a buffalo mating call at obscene decibels.






What really hit home for me was watching them assemble and make their catalytic converters from scratch!! You see, with the internship that Volkswagen of America offered to me in Detroit this past spring, I would have been doing Quality Assurance on their catalytic converter systems...so to see these puppies being made from scratch was actually kind of sentimental to me, like I was reminded of how hard of a decision it was at that point in my life to turn down the VW job. It meant more to me, to see these converters being built from scratch. It was like I instantaneously learned so much more about the parts, just by watching how it was made from chunks of raw materials.

Very, very, mesmerizing.


I loved every drop of that tour. The iron so hot it was glowing pink; the deformation machines that came crashing down on the iron to form it to a pattern, shaking the entire warehouse floor's aluminum diamond-plated patterned pannels beneath my feet. It looked like big dinosaur jaws, it was incredible!!

The gear boxes, the high-speed lathes with combination mill mouths that spun the steel cylinder around in the vice of the lathe, to carve different diameters of the gearbox into the cylinder...and then the mill mouth that would drill into the cylinder just-so, to put a hole in it.

It was all perfectly timed; everyone was very impressed, even those upper-classmen in this program that have gone through the ropes and know a lot of this stuff already, that we've learned in the past 2.5 weeks.

Volkswagen made me proud! By the end of the 2-hour tour, everyone's feet were sore, but our noses rung with the glorious New Car Smell, and people were coming up to me and complimenting me on being so enthusiastic for the tour that day. It was as if they finally understood my love for the company, after sharing that experience with me. :)

It all also reinforced that I feel that engineering is the proper field for me. The tour was entirely inspiring, and made me proud to know that I will be a part of this field that creates great things from nothing. It's all pretty moving.




AND, I got a souvenir from the place!! At the end of the tour, the group came to one last robot, and it had two arms with a mashing nose. One arm grabbed a thin, square piece of flat aluminum, about the size of two sticks of gum lined up next to each other, and placed it into this little groove on a table below the arm. The second arm placed a VW-bottle-opener patterned square on top of the Gum-sized rectangular pieces, and the robot nose would then come mooshing down on top of the two slices of metal, pushing the bottle-opener pattern-square into the smooth, original rectangle of aluminum.

The nose would come back up, the second arm would reach in and pull out its pattern-square, and the first arm would reach down and pick up your new, still warm, bottle-opener that was punched to match the pattern of the pattern-square. The arm dropped the bottle-opener down a carpeted slide, and the slide ended right where you could place your hands, to catch your bottle opener. There is even a little keychain hole drilled into the bottle-opener, so you can attach it to a string or ring of keychains. Or say, the set of car keys to your OWN Volkswagen, wink wink! ;)

Everyone on the tour (about 30 people) was supposed to receive one. However, it must have been a sign from up above or something, because shortly after I had my turn to get my bottle-opener, the machine jammed up and stopped working. Robot Arm #2 went dead in mid-reach of pulling out a fresh bottle-opener. So, half the class did not get their souvenirs...but I did, which is so neat! It was meant to be. :) :)


I am adding this bottle-opener to the fat stock of items I am keeping in my German folder here in Germany. I am keeping them in specific chronological order, so that when I get back to the States, I am going to make a SCRAPBOOK of my amazing trip here! It is a trip I have always, always secretly dreamed of...and now that I did it, I want to make a memorial for it that is respectable.

I am saving everything: receipts, wrappers from particularly good chocolate candy bars, postcards, brochures from tours of castles or excursions from class, and even little doilie-bags that some of the food I've ordered at original German cafes are packaged in...just all the little things that I hope will help bring you guys on this trip with me, as soon as you would get the chance to page through the scrapbook. :)