Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 11, 1995 TAG: 9507110039
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STELLA M. EISELE Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: GREENSBORO, N.C. LENGTH: Medium
A strip of jagged rocks, deep ruts, banked curves and giant bumps - undoubtedly the state's worst stretch of road - awaited the shiny, new $125,000 truck.
``I'm a test guy, so I love it,'' said Ashley Dudding, a Volvo senior test engineer running the endurance track. ``Our design guys get a little torqued up. They say, `You're destroying our trucks!' But anything we do here, someone will do somewhere in the world.''
What Volvo does at the track is knock the daylights out of its trucks. Sixty seconds on the one-mile circuit is a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling, behind-bruising punishment.
An endurance test typically is four to six months of eight-hour days driving around the killer track.
``We drive them and see what falls off,'' Dudding said, grinning as he set about the job. Dudding is a Blacksburg native and graduate of Virginia Tech.
Volvo GM Heavy Truck Corp. has its headquarters in Greensboro but assembles its trucks in Dublin, Va., and Orrville, Ohio. The company started with a small test track five years ago for design work and truck noise testing. Over time it added pieces, such as the oversize speed bumps for testing the company's construction vehicles. A stretch of misshapen concrete chunks tests how a truck withstands hard hits.
But for endurance testing, the company shipped trucks to a General Motors test track in Milford, Mich. GM owns 13 percent of the company. Volvo also rented other automakers' tracks and sent trucks to Sweden for testing at AB Volvo, the truck company's majority owner.
Three years ago, Dudding and other engineers started working on a track in Greensboro, closer to where the company employs about 700 people in design, engineering and testing. They wanted an on-site track to improve quality and provide a consistent testing environment designed for their specific needs. Local testing also saves time and money.
Endurance testing is important for heavy trucks because they typically have a lifespan of at least 1 million miles. During that time, trucks run into some extra nasty bumps and holes and the regular route of ruts, turns and potholes that can knock things loose.
An endurance track condenses that wear and tear into a brief hellish beating.
Washboard surfaces ripple the road, testing strength and fatigue levels of the truck bodies. Large boulders jut out of the surface, testing suspension. A concrete skid pad tests braking and turning. All of this to make sure the Volvo GM trucks can handle North American road surfaces.
The one-mile track tests Class 8 trucks, which carry loads up to 35,000 pounds.
To design their track, Volvo equipped a truck with sensors and drove it 20,000 miles all over North America, testing the force of jolts and bumps. From those measurements, they came up with a trucker's nightmare of 60,000 granite blocks, precisely placed at heights calculated to provide a horrible ride.
``They didn't believe we really wanted it built this way,'' said Keith Hoile, a Volvo spokesman, recalling the stonemasons' reactions.
``We can pretty well simulate any operating environment,'' Dudding said. ``On every lap of this road, we know you can get the peak [jolt] of the biggest pothole around Chicago.''
Chrome-plated exhaust pipes shudder. Mud flaps quiver. Tires, jostled mercilessly by the terrain, bounce so much that they become a gray blur. A passenger, wearing shoulder and lap belts, bounces a foot in the air on the most wicked hits.
And then there's the noise.
Every one of the more than 20,000 parts slamming into each other seems to be screaming in protest. The diesel engine roars. Even the plastic covering on the bunk-bed mattresses rustles loud enough to be heard.
Surely the whole truck will fall to pieces.
But it doesn't, not if Dudding and his colleagues have done their jobs right.
The headlights don't shatter. The soft, fleece curtains in the sleeper stay hung. The buttons and levers on the dash don't shake loose. The wheels don't fall off. The floor doesn't cave in.
Dudding hitches his britches and drives away, still grinning.
Landmark News Service contributed information to this story.
by CNB