Last week we, the graduate engineers were on a study visit trip, as Gustav wrote about in the previous post. After the visit at Airbus in Toulouse, we flew over to England and our first stop, Bristol. On Tuesday we made a day trip to Birmingham where we visited GKN Driveline Birmingham. Here we met Alicia Wilson, HR, and Niel Geldard-Williams, Plant Director GKN Birmingham. Niel made a presentation about Driveline in general and more detailed about the factory in Birmingham where the drive shafts and prop shafts are manufactured to several different automobile manufacturers worldwide. We learned more about how the shafts are working, their function and about the manufacturing process of the different shafts.

We had a shop tour where we got the opportunity to see how the shafts were manufactured, from entering as steel bars to drive / prop shafts. The factory in Birmingham is a modern factory which produces a total of around 53 000 bar shafts per week in 98 different versions. We all enjoyed the tour and it was especially interesting to see and compare the differences between the high-volume production in Birmingham with our low-volume production here in Trollhättan.