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COMPANY NEWS
but that is always the case in business. What we have now is a partnership with a global tyre manufacturer and with Bridgestone Bandag we are assured of the future.”
The LBB Workshop
casings coming in for inspection – shearography and nail hole detection, along with a visual inspection: Rejects being sent for recycling, good casings being either sent to stock for future retreading, or forwarded for repairs and buffing.
Buffing was carried out on a
Stock is supplied on what is essentially a just in time basis. Not an issue when you are no more than an hour from the supplier’s warehouse
The LBB workshop is in fact a “model” facility. And visitors will notice the prominence of the Bandag brand in the LBB framework. The first point was
pair of fully automatic buffers, one man loading and unloading both machines. This gave an obvious time and labour saving advantage to the production
the risk by developing the cassette system for loading.
The plant was not just painted in Bandag livery, but care had gone into ensuring that the workshop colours suited the tasks being performed. Light coloured floors are used in areas that need to be kept clean. The light colour shows up the dirst and makes it easier to clean. In the paint area, a black floor disguises any overspray, but the facility still looks clean.
After curing the tyres were given a final inspection, and were laser tagged with their retread data, and then painted to complete the process.
In 2011, before a series of improvements, the plant was processing some 75 tyres per day on average. In 2012 the plant was operating at capacity
and working every day. However, by 2014 changes in production saw the output increase to in excess of 110 tyres per day, a total of around 16,000 – 17,000 truck and bus tyres per year.
Just to round off the credentials of LBB as a company that seeks excellence and efficiency, the roof of the building is covered in solar panels. These panels produce enough energy to run the plant and feed into the grid during daylight hours. LBB only pays for electricity on the night shift.
Tyres are produced on CoC and for stock. Adjacent to the plant is a warehouse with a range of materials and tyres, both casing stock and retreaded stock, some 2300 tyres ready to go.
LBB adopts the latest technology as it becomes appropriate. Here we see a tyre being labelled by a laser tagging device. Below is the highly professional end product of using the laser tagging
Armin Müller Joins Bridgestone Bandag
Armin Müller has joined Bridgestone Bandag as a Regional Retread and FCO Business Development Manager for the company’s Eastern Region, based at Warsaw, Poland with effect from January 2014.
It is Müller’s second stint at Bridgestone Bandag, having first joined Bandag Europe in 1993. In 1997 he moved to Bandag do Brasil, being involved in the modernisation of Bandag retread facilities in
Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. From 2000 until 2013 he has filled various management positions related to the tyre and retread industry in the Americas, before returning to Europe. In recent years he has been active in the marketing departments of leading shearography equipment manufacturers.
that the trucks loading and unloading were liveried with both LBB and Bandag logos. It was clear that this was a Bandag franchise. It was curious to see that two of the trailers in the yard were liveried with tromp l’oeil artwork that made them look like curtainsiders, but they were in fact conventional rear door trucks. Both trucks were spotlessly clean, this in a miserable second week in January.
The entrance to the workshop was the reception area with
line. Tyres would come off the buffer and onto the monorail, pass through skiving and filling, then on to cementing via a VMI- CTC builder and then tread application and stapling, before being put into envelopes and onto a cassette that was used to fill the autoclaves. The system had been modified to ensure that no-one ever had to enter the autoclave. The loading and unloading of the autoclaves by hand was a high risk area, so this was one point where Bandag had moved to eliminate
20 Retreading Business