Body shop
The body shop deals with the following areas:
- Manufacture of bodies and body parts for vehicles and machines
- Design and manufacture of body prototypes for land vehicle construction
- furthermore its maintenance and repair, as well as special vehicle construction such as ambulance and hearse construction
Various techniques and materials are used here. The area differs fundamentally from aircraft construction and is therefore treated separately.
The load-bearing or non-load-bearing cell of a land vehicle or a guided machine is usually referred to as a body.
It serves to protect, accommodate and separate or combine individual components and parts within a unit, the body. The external design of vehicles also fulfills aerodynamic and design requirements.
Artisanal body construction
The first vehicles at the beginning of the 20th century still mostly had bodies in composite construction , that is, sheet metal panels were nailed to a wooden skeleton frame. There were also bodies covered with wood and covered with artificial leather. The coachbuilder increasingly emerged from the profession of coach builder.
When buying a new car, it was common practice to only order the chassis ex works and to have a body built on top of it by a bodybuilder of your own choice. During this time, well-known body construction companies emerged, with names that are still known in classic circles today, such as Saoutchik or Figoni & Falaschi in France or Erdmann & Rossi or the Reutter bodywork factory in Stuttgart . Exalted, sweeping, sensational designs as well as craftsmanship were more than mere quantities at that time and increased the reputation of both the bodybuilder and the customer.
Since the outbreak of the Second World War and in the period that followed, these small companies gradually disappeared almost completely due to a lack of demand until the end of the 1960s. Now war-worthy or inexpensive vehicles were in demand.
Longer durability, lower costs, greater rigidity and simpler machine series production increasingly led to self-supporting all-steel or aluminum bodies in automobile construction.
Nevertheless, a large part of manual work predominates, even in series production. Post-processing through large manufacturing tolerances was the norm. Robots had not found their way into production until the late 1960s.
This was also the time when a new way of thinking about safety in the vehicle and body shop began, as the call for a safe passenger cell was growing ever stronger.
Body construction in industry
A few years after the World War, there was great demand for an affordable automobile of one's own. This was driven by more rational production methods on the part of the industry, which now increasingly produced inexpensive small cars in large numbers on the assembly line.
Car bodies made of steel or aluminum have been largely fully automated on production lines since around the 70s of the last century. Mixed forms of aluminum / steel connections or sandwich constructions are also possible.
The department, which is also called body construction, includes pressing and punching equipment on which sheet metal from coils is cut to size, deep-drawn into shape and then supplied with openings to welding robots. This set - now computer surveillance - from the individual elements, the bodies by welding, gluing, soldering and other new techniques such as clinching ( "clinching") together.
In order to save weight and to meet more stringent (crash) safety standards, today's car bodies are improved through the use of sophisticated profiles, but also through the choice of materials itself.
For example, high-strength steels are used in statically stressed areas, light materials in less stressed areas, and the material thickness can also vary within the body structure.
Individual evidence
- ↑ 7-forum.com: Production of BMW 7 Series (G11) in the Dingolfing plant: body shop. June 12, 2015. Retrieved July 19, 2017 .
- ^ Spiegel Online, Hamburg, Germany: Wood in vehicle construction: Back to the roots. Retrieved July 19, 2017 .