Production dampers
Strength through technology, through the DSSV dampers.
A damper model I built in MATLAB and Simulink, and the tool that feeds it. The port window is drawn by hand and turned into an area curve; the model then takes one velocity input and returns the flow through that area, the force it produces, and the body and rod states. It is the piece of work here I am most pleased with, because it turns a damper from a curve you measure into a mechanism you can reason about. The scales are Multimatic's, so the plots below keep their shape and lose their values.
Trials, launch builds and the tooling around them. Programme names, numbers, curves and tolerances belong to Multimatic and are not here; what follows is the method and what it changed.
Run-at-rate builds to prove the line could hold takt at volume, process validation against the control plan, and site acceptance testing on the new line equipment. This is the work that decides whether a damper design is actually manufacturable at rate.
I characterised striker cap heat dissipation through a thermal soak, correlating component temperature against outcome down the line. The result separated a thermal mechanism from a handling one and gave the line a measurable threshold to work to.
A machining change to an internal component was expected to improve consistency, but nobody had put a number on it. I plotted the dyno results as histograms against the population from before the change, so bump and rebound could each be judged on the spread rather than on a single sample.
Traced an inconsistency in rebound results to an internal geometry effect rather than to the test itself. The design constraint could not be changed inside the current program, so I established which feature of the measured trace actually represents the part's behaviour, and the measurement was revised to read that feature.
Ran parts through full stroke on the dyno and compared the force-displacement behaviour against the standard PSD test, to see what the shorter test was not catching.
Worked through measurement problems on the Keyence vision systems at end of line: improved repeatability, added inspection tooling, and built reference features so the regions of inspection landed in the same place every time. Carried the remaining issues to Keyence for further improvements.
Integrated build-operating-system ideas into the line layout and took one operator out of the line, without moving the work onto the stations either side of the gap.
Three tools, each aimed at a job people were doing by hand. A damper file search that cuts the time to find a barcode in the database, splits the results by file type and writes a log of where each one came from. A converter that rolls maximum torque across many exports into one summary workbook. And drag-select added to the dyno plotting software, so files no longer have to be added and removed one at a time.
The damper programs I worked on, grouped by the customer they ship to, named by the production vehicles they ship on. Internal program designations are omitted.
Truck dampers in volume, across the light and heavy duty variants of the platform. Most of my line time, trials and launch work sat here.
Cup car dampers: the same spool valve principle as the trucks, built to a race program's tolerances and rebuild cycle rather than a production line's takt.
A single program, the SF90, run alongside the truck work on the low volume side of the floor.
Three generations of the same idea: inboard dampers on the One-77, a pushrod layout with adjustable damping and anti-dive on the Vulcan, and the adaptive spool valve on the Valiant.
The Camaro Z/28 was the first high volume production road car to run racing-derived spool valve dampers. The other trims of the same car kept conventional and magnetic units, which makes it a clean comparison.
