Slipped Through Ford's Fingers

[OneMore]

Hi Mark,

In my back stories I explain why we called this the Windlemon from the first Prototype where my engineer ripped the rear axle out of the $2 million prototype vehicle...

Okay...can't find it... So here it is again.

I was in CAE and Product Verification at the time and I had Chassis CAE. Included was obtaining Program Loads for new vehicles. I got one of the first Windstar prototypes, which we shipped off to Instrumentation where there were about 200 channels of load transducers, stress and strain, displacement movements were instrumented. It takes about 3 months to get the whole vehicle instrumented at that time. So the Windstar (Windlemon) was completed and the Instrumentation Lab took the vehicle out to the pot hole course to check out all the channels where this huge unbilical cable was attached to a follow beside Instrumentation Van. During the slow speed drive down the pothole course a catastrophic failure occurred where the whole rear axle, wheels and tires were ripped out of the vehicle. My engineer Nand K was shocked and came into my office with the worried look of what are we going to do. We headed over to the test track and there was the axle, wheels and tires and trailing arms, parking brake cables and brake line laying in two potholes and the axleless vehicle sitting in the next set of potholes on its rear bumper. Shit hit the fan in Windstar design and by the evening I was called to a meeting to understand what happened. I reminded the higher ups that I had no involvement in the CAE as the "best and brightest CAE engineers" were taken for the program. The Chief engineer was really upset (pissed!) and ordered me to get involved NOW!

Next morning I approached my top CAE analyst and told him to drop everything and go over and review the CAE analysis of the rear axle brackets attached to the body. I had an 11 am meeting to report findings so pressure was on. About 10:30 am I got a call...He had found the problem with the CAE analysis. The "best and brightest" used a rear axle weigh of 1 lb. It should have been 130 lbs, so the body attaching brackets were made of tin foil to what would really be needed. I walked into the 11am meeting and all eyes were on me. I cut to the chase and relayed the info on this huge mistake that could have killed people driving the prototypes (think driving prototypes is exciting???) What followed was a set of edicts from the Chief Engineer. Halt prototype build, Phil will oversee all CAE, Program Chief engineer will head up fixing the problem of getting the prototype build back on schedule and so on... CAE can be garbage in equals garbage out, which was the case and these book smart people had on concept to just look at the fabricated brackets as too flimsy.

Some sleepless nights and crash program to get back on track resulted in robust brackets and I got the test data we needed for further CAE analysis. The chief program engineer announced his retirement toward the end of the fiasco and some of the "best and brightest" were reassigned to other tasks and were career ending as a result. Several quit Ford.

Okay, I hope this makes sense...it was in later years a great war story of the Windlemon.

Best,
Phil

Thank you for your insightful and interesting, behind the scene, stories from your days working at Ford.
I always enjoy reading them.

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[Motorpsychology]

Hi Mike,

That is it! It was cordoned off in the Exec Garage so we could only look at it and could not touch it. Then next day it was gone and we never saw it again...left with the dark of night.... If I recall correctly, it was code named MiniMax.

best,
Phil

It looks oddly GM-ish