Most of my time in Alaska, my duty Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) was as a Wheeled Vehicle Mechanic (63B). I found it wryly amusing since most the vehicles I worked on was the M978 Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV). The SUSV was made by Hagglunds and Sonner (A Swedish Company) and is a two-car tracked snow cat with hydraulically actuated steering between the cars. Each car has a pair of two-foot wide rubber tracks with steel inserts and there was a driveshaft through the interconnecting link giving all four tracks drive.
My initial reaction was “What the Fuck (WTF)?” I’m not a track mechanic! But being in the army is mostly doing what you were told and I quickly learned all I could about this critter as they kept me busy repairing them. I can’t blame the SUSV so much as the Army for forcing a re-design of something that wasn’t broken. The Swedish version uses a six-cylinder gasoline engine. The US Army wanted all Diesel-powered vehicles. This resulted in a re-design with a Mercedes-Benz TD 300, five-cylinder turbo-diesel engine. The engine itself was great, but some design changes used to make it fit, those caused problems.
The problems were two-fold; vibration, and an off-set auxiliary drive shaft for the hydraulic pump. The cooling fan for the radiator was offset from the centerline of the engine and was mounted on an X-brace with a tensioner pulley on one leg of the brace. The vibration of the diesel engine caused brace welds to crack and the fan belt tensioner would then lose tension, causing the engine to overheat. Additionally, there were defects in the fan hub design that caused the fiberglass fan blades to come loose from the hub. What made all of this so special, was limited access to the front of the engine, due to the swim capability of the vehicle. The hydraulic pump was just left of the radiator and its drive shaft was offset ten-degrees from the engine drive line. The original T-type universal joints didn’t fare well and were replaced with flex packs that were much hardier. I became adept at pulling the radiator, replacing the fan, the fan brace and universal joints. (You had to remove the radiator to access any of those items.) Once those design flaws were fixed, (an improved fan design, a substantially reinforced X-brace and the flex packs), the majority of problems with the vehicle design were resolved. But in other ways, the vehicle was financially lucrative to me personally.
Like many companies, the Army had a suggestion program. I first learned how nice these programs could be from my father who earned over $4000 from Keebler on a suggestion he made. In general, most suggestion programs have a payoff of say ten-percent of what is saved in the first year using the suggestion. I had two suggestions payoff for me.
The first one was easy. I noticed that we were replacing the brake light switch on SUSV’s, somewhere between 12 to 18 months after they were built. It was a plunger switch and when you braked, the plunger was released and the brake lights illuminated. When you took your foot off the brake, the plunger was depressed and the brake lights were turned off. Between 12 and 18 months after they were built, the brake lights would not go off, running down the battery. Installing a replacement switch resolved the problem. It was a five-minute job and the switch was like $12 so it didn’t involve a lot of money, but it was an annoying problem.
After I replaced my third switch or so (My unit had about a dozen SUSVs) I noticed that the jam nut for adjusting the switch was all the way down on the failed switches. When you installed the new switch, there was an adjustment. The new switch, when properly adjusted, had the jam nut exposing about five threads. It appeared that during the assembly process at the manufacturer, the person installing the switch wasn’t adjusting it during the install, just screwing it all the way in. The switch would work for a while, but over compression the spring in the switch eventually caused the spring to fail. I suggested a one-time inspection of the entire SUSV fleet to adjust the brake light switch per the service manual. Viola! Problem solved. My net income from the suggestion was the minimum payment of $50.00. Not bad for a simple observation.
The next suggestion was more convoluted, but also more lucrative. This suggestion involved scheduled maintenance services on the SUSV. All army vehicles have a service schedule. Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annual, Annual and Bi-annual are the general service periods. But there is also a mileage maximum you might exceed triggering the same services. Services were triggered by either meeting the mileage requirement, or the time requirement, whichever was met first. The monthly service was simple and only took about 20 minutes. However, one check required a mechanic (The rest of the monthly service was done by the vehicle operator.) and that one check required scheduling someone to come in with the vehicle and having a mechanic make that one check. These monthly services were waste of time for both the crew and the mechanic. They also really annoyed me as I was the vehicle service supervisor for the battalion.
I also noticed that all the services for SUSVs were triggered by the calendar requirement. We had never met the mileage requirement for any service. (One year or 15,000 kilometers for example.) We were spending about half the total manpower available for service, scheduling these monthly services alone. These manpower requirements were starting to add up. I did some math and the distance required for a quarterly service was rarely if ever met in a year of use. The vehicles were averaging about 2800 KM a year and the quarterly service was required at 300 KM. I pondered this for a few days, did some research with other motor pools and made a suggestion. Incorporate the Monthly service into the Quarterly service and change then cut mileage requirements for the remaining services 50% to align the service scheduling with real life usage. The hardest part of the suggestion was figuring the math in a way that couldn’t be argued. I was able to show that across the 172d brigade, applying these changes would save over $24,000 in man-hours and materials. End result was $2,400 bonus ($1200 after taxes but still free money) and at that time over a month’s net pay. Not much physical labor, but some serious skull sweat.
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