Raymond Gregoire
  Maintenance engineer
Magee Rieter Automotive Systems
  Bloomsburg, PA

Magee Rieter Automotive Systems is a subsidiary of Rieter Automotive, based in Switzerland. The firm has more than 14,600 employees worldwide. Raymond has worked in the Bloomsburg plant for the last 15 years and as one of the key “go-to” troubleshooters, he is often put to the test.

One of the plant’s products is a foam backing for automotive carpet. Foam-in-place equipment pours foam into automotive floor molds where it adheres to carpet to create a combination pad and soundproofing substrate. As with all injection applications, sometimes this process goes awry, and Raymond applied his skills to solve the costly problem.

“We were being plagued by downtime and other issues due to collection of ‘dark mud’ in our day tank,” explains Ben Mackiwicz, Raymond’s supervisor. “Raymond usually gets involved after we have failed to address an issue. He applied basic theories and eliminated variables to arrive at an obvious yet obscure answer – one that not even our foam supplier could provide.”

“If the foam on the bottom of the carpet does not have the right composite, we have to scrap it, and we were getting a lot of scrap at that point,” explains John Novak, Raymond’s immediate supervisor. “And because we were seeing the problem intermittently, it took him two days of intense back and forth analysis to find the solution.”

Ultimately, Raymond’s analysis of production records and other data led him to one of two tanks supplying the material for the foam machines. Eventually, despite the vendor’s assurances to the contrary, Raymond determined that the concentrations in the suspect tank were incorrect.

Another situation with the same injection process involved the carbon dioxide used to generate the foam. After the engineering staff hit several dead ends, Raymond was again called in and traced the problem back to defective metering devices that were giving production inaccurate readings.

This article appeared in the December 2006/January 2007 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2006.

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