Carl F. Thelin

         KRIZMAN         

My family moved to South Bend, Indiana. It is home of the old Studebaker car plants. A nearby suburb with mostly new homes is the location of the plant of Krizman, Inc. The company manufactures small parts for the retail aftermarket of steering and suspension components, such as ball joints and steering tie rods. It was founded by Mr. Krizman, and was wholly owned by his family. As I anticipated while I was at Consumers Union, the pay and perks were generous. The hiring committee seemed interested in my background at CAL, and very much so about the time with Consumer Reports. Later, I discovered that was really what they wanted. They did not even ask about my background as an R&D engineer in their field.

Mr. Krizman was an innovative machinist, who built his business by making less expensive replacement parts for older cars. These sold well, at such low prices. However, Krizman was not an engineer, and never seemed to have anyone on his staff that could advise him that he had problems with some of his designs.

         BAD SIGNS

When I was hired to be the first Chief Engineer of Krizman, another new hire came aboard. He was the new head of the Inspection Department. I got to know him and was impressed with his background.  Meeting his staff, I discovered that there had been a frequent turnover of leaders and staffers. One inspector, a woman, told me privately that the turnover was because Mr. Krizman always overruled anyone who rejected any item did not meet the quality requirements.

Part of my responsibility was to introduce more varieties of s&s parts to cover a larger percentage of new-design front wheel drive cars soon to become old enough to need replacement parts after their warranty expired. Krizman was a competitor to the manufacturers of original equipment (OE) parts used in the car factories. Unless there was some industrial espionage, Mr. Krizman was not going to see the engineering drawings and quality control specs from them. So, his staff of skilled machinists simply bought the OE maker’s replacement parts at retail store, tore them apart and copied everything except for using their tricks to make them cheaper. Cheap is not better.

         OVERHEATING THE SPRINGS

The inspection department did have some of the quality control (QC) specification that had been “learned” from the OE part makers. Ball joints and tie rod ends must be tight and remain so for their useful life. The QC tests involve some simple measures. First, one twisted the ball stud about its axis within the housing, then you rocked the stud from side to side, while using a torque wrench (with adapters) to measure the torque. There was a minimum acceptable figure for the various sizes. On many of the Krizman models, the QC people found the value far below, so they rejected them. Then the supervisor of the factory would attempt to override the rejection. Next KRIZMAN came in and flatly told the factory to package and to ship the parts anyway.

Most of the parts had a ball inside the housing, and a stud with a tapered shank poking out of the hole. Above the ball would be a steel spring in most models. Sometimes the space was too little for a spring. Instead, a firm piece of rubber was used to make the pressure between the ball and the housing. In either case, as the surface between the ball and the housing wore away, due to ingestion of sand and salt from the road, the ball would become loose, and the steering would become sloppy, or the suspension would rattle.

Some, but not all, of the distributors of s&s parts had their own inspection departments. Those that did frequently returned shipments to the factory. The boss’s response was to have those parts re-boxed and sent to a distributor that did not do incoming inspections, when he thought he could get away with it. I was told to telephone the head of the outfit that rejected our stuff and tell the man that I was the Krizman Chief Engineer. I would apologize and say that we were correcting some of the machining errors.

I wish that was true. I did try to stop Krizman’s people from designing new models by copying OE parts. We needed to know about and use the design features that I recognized as important. I went to tour the factory. I was stunned. Most OE parts were assembled this way: the cup-shaped steel housing, called a socket, was placed in a receptacle in a press, the ball stud was dropped in tail down, then an upper cup, a spring and a cover. Then a hydraulic press staked the cover into the socket with great force. In the Krizman factory, the assembly sequence was the same, but the cover was fixed in place by automated welding around the circumference of the socket.

I was shocked by that ignorance. Didn’t our people realize that blaming the people who supplied our coil springs was fruitless? KRIZMAN kept asking for stiffer springs. No! The real problem is that the heat of welding the covers into the housing was annealing the springs. It was ruining the spring-factory heat treatment – making them soft and unable to maintain the downward pressure.

I pointed this out, beginning at the shop level, then in the inspection department and finally in the Monday morning weekly management conference. I pointed out that several of our larger customers were rejecting and returning parts that were too loose. Some were telling me horror stories of complaints from retailers and even from customers. Some of our products were so poorly made that they were blamed for crashes of high-mileage taxicabs in Chicago. I told Mr. Krizman and his many relatives in that meeting that I had been in this scenario before. I mentioned the case where the Chevrolet Corvair was put on the market because no one had the courage to tell Mr. Ed Cole to wait until the defects were corrected. I compared Cole to President Nixon who did not follow the advice to get rid of the cancer (the Watergate burglars) that was a cancer on his administration. The overheated springs were our cancer that could result in a devastating lawsuit.

NEXT: Black Friday