Start with the question every fleet manager already knows the answer to: what kills a shuttle bus? Rot. Water finds a seam, sits in plywood, and eats the bus from the inside. Everything on our line exists to close that path.
Steel and laser. Steel arrives pickled and oiled. Cross-members, brackets, mounts, and door frames are laser-cut and bent in-house on a TRUMPF laser and press brake — clean, burr-free, dimensionally consistent. Wire pass-throughs are lasered here too, then grommeted so wire never rides a raw edge.
Powder coat. Sandblast, chemical wash and rinse, then 400°F powder coat on every structural component. The magnetically charged powder wraps into crevices primer never reaches.
The cage. Certified welders stitch-weld the cage — never more than 6 inches apart — directly on the chassis, step by step. Doubled roof tube. Welded rear-wall X-brace. Welded skirt. Full-perimeter welds are our standard, not a bid-spec extra.
Foam. Every piece of insulation is cut to its exact frame cavity off the weld-shop prints and glued — not taped — in place. 100% coverage, no condensation pockets.
Lamination. The sidewall goes on as one continuous pressure-laminated panel, roofline to skirt. No beltline seam. No floor-line seam.
The floor. 5/8" PerformMAX 500 resin-infused subfloor on laser-cut crossmembers, edge-encapsulated in fabricated angle, sealed at every seam, with welded full-length seat track.
The harness shop. Every harness built in-house. Watertight marine-grade connectors. Wire loom over printed wire. Butt connectors and tap splices are banned in the building.
The rain booth. 300 gallons a minute for 25 minutes, a person inside hunting leaks, every single bus — then straight out the door into a 25-mile road test with hard braking and acceleration. A final inspection packet signs off every department before delivery.
We weld plain steel — no aluminized, no galvanized — as a permanent choice, because welding those steels makes welders sick. We use the steel that lets our welders go home healthy. Quality gets built by people who stay.
And we're deliberately not a forty-a-day line. Every bus is built on its chassis, moved station to station only when the group leader signs the check sheet.
Bring a bat for the roof sample. We mean it.