Driveline Services Factory Tour

16 April 1999

It was Friday night and we had a guided factory tour of Driveline Services at Archerfield. The tour was led by Steve Person, the company's CV and now power steering specialist, and his offsider, Ray Minto, who is now the new CV expert. The evening started off with complimentary snacks and soft drinks.

Steve proceeded to speak about the company's history and what it does. Driveline started. about fourteen years ago with three employees doing quality reconditioning and balancing of tail, propshafts and universal joints.

Around ten years ago, Steve started the CV joint section, which is now headed by Ray who has been trained by Steve. Recently Steve has starte the company's new power steering reconditioning section.

The tour started in the fully sealed and air conditioned power steering rooms, where the steering units are stripped, reconditioned and rebuilt, then tested on a special machine that has been designed and built in-house by Steve and his expert team.

This machine is able to run the steering units at full operating pressure, with various gauges reading the pressure the whole operation of the unit is fully checked. They can recondition all the most popular makes, including Subarus.

We were then led to the rest of the factory area where the tail and propshafts are made and balanced. They also build their own machines in house to do these jobs and are also supplied to their agents for their use. In the CV section all the reconditioning which is done by hand and the assembly is carried out. Now this section is one of the main pails and busiest of the business. Reconditioned and new driveshafts are sold on an exchange basis, about 90% of sales are in new shafts. Around 30,000 driveshaft boots are carried in stock. The company's replacement boot kits are called Drive Pro and are packed in green and white boxes consisting of a boot, two metal clamps and tube of grease. They use special Castrol grease called Argi BTX, green in colour for the inner joints. For outer joints they use new improved Castrol grease very similar in colour and look to LMM. It is only available in bulk.

The tour finished with Steve and Ray answering questions. This was a great opportunity for club members to see the operations of the Driveline Factory. It was plain to see by what we saw how much care and effort, Driveline go to supply quality products. Overall it was a very informative night thanks to Steve and Ray.

David Martin SC180