Toured the Jasper Engine & Trans plant today

[grcthird]

So our Jasper sales rep invited me to go on a plant tour today, got to the airport at about 5 am and jumped in their plane for a flight to Indiana. Learned a lot of cool stuff about how they do things and got to see some really interesting things. I figured you guys would enjoy seeing some of it. ;D

First off, brand spanking new King Air twin prop plane was stupid nice, leather seats, ipod radio hookups, blah blah, 400+ mph got us there in about 1.5 hours from Birmingham to southern Indiana.



We started off checking out some of the automatic tranny rebuilds.





Here are all the components cleaned/rebuilt and new, ready to be installed into a case.



Assembled trans getting painted.



Getting hooked up on a dyno, which is a big electric engine, and being run to make sure it works properly.



Core cases disassembled and being cleaned up for inspection.



Got rods?



They check out the engine blocks, heads, rods, cranks, and cams and after machine work, boring, sleaving, grinding, ect. these parts get reused if possible. Everything else is new.
Here is a stack of rebuilt heads, all the valves get a 3 angle job and are checked for leakage, correct spring pressure, ect.

 

[grcthird]

Here's what the core storage area looks like. Note the engine on the top right of the picture COVERED in mud.





They also do marine engines. 2 stroke outboard power head just being cleaned.



Anybody know what these are?





Got Cams? They literally go over every cam with a microscope to make sure they are in spec. If not they get tossed into the scrap pile.



Doing a little bit of crank grinding. All cranks, and blocks for that matter, are machined to use standard over/undersized bearings, pistons ect. No oddball sized stuff.



Yeah I had to take this picture, these are just check rods and caps.

 

[grcthird]

Another picture of some head work being done.



Stuff ready to be shipped all over the country.







Got gaskets? No waiting on the parts store going on here.



There are numerous engine dynos and every engine is run up to operating temperature.



This particular Allison Trans got rejected after it's dyno performance and will be fixed and dynod again.



Got Axles? Thirds?





Every axle gets blasted and new internal parts. Full floaters get new spindles fitted on.

 

[grcthird]

Definitly custom!



Got ... nevermind



Matched rods waiting to be installed.



Complete engine waiting to be assembled.



Here is the diesel dyno. They put them thru some pretty good pulls and testing before they are ready to ship out.

 

[grcthird]

They have an onsite shop for company and I guess employee vehicles. The car in the picture is a kit that was once owned by the (now deceased) man who started the shop I work at. He originally bought it from Jasper, had it for a few years, then sold it back to them. They still use it at shows and such. It was getting the clutch bled today.





I was impressed by the quality of work, the controlled environment, and attention to detail they put into their product. Their warranty department said they have about a 3% come back rate. Some of that is due to installation issues : but they tear down and inspect everything that comes back, and even pull units off the shelf to teardown and inspect.

 

[cztheman64]

very cool!

 

[kmcminn]

Nice thread I enjoyed reading it. How big was the facility.

 

[grcthird]

Huge! They actually have the original plant in Jasper that they outgrew and another about 30 minutes away. They built the second place in a county with a high unemployment rate to provide jobs for people. Mostly farm land up there so not a ton of jobs everywhere. I got some more cool pictures to post up tomorrow.

 

[Cask16]

Very cool to see! I'm really impressed at how clean the place is, even the core storage area!

 

[jwilson645]

We had a Jasper trans put in our Expedition after numerous problems from the original Ford one. I went with the Jasper because they gave a 3 year/100k mile warranty and I knew they pretty much just reused the case and put in new internals. For $400 more than it was going to cost to pull my original and have it rebuilt with a 90 day warranty I got the Jasper with a great warranty installed including new lines and cooler. We have 100k on that trans and not one singe problem with it.

 

[grcthird]

Exactly Josh, they will update and fix stuff that OEMs keep installing that have known issues with. I think the Honda Odyssey trans has about 18 updates from Jasper.

Here's something freaking cool, let's say you have a model T engine or a numbers matching big block for your Chevelle, and you need it rebuilt.
There is a special place that only works one building these types of engine. Disassembly, machine work, reassembly all takes place right here.






The plant generates some of it's own power. Here is room full of Ford 460s running off natural gas and hooked up to generators. Since they have an alternative fuels division and a division that rebuilds electric motors, they were able to set all this up in house.




They rebuild torque converters as well. All the tcs that have the plastic insert bushing get it replaced with an aluminum piece and all the fins are brazed to the impeller and turbine to prevent ballooning. They are going to start offering tcs built for specific applications in the near future. They have a big machine that welds them back together, note the big ass Hobart spool of wire in the cardboard drum that feeds the welder.



This guy has been with Jasper since 1966. He checks valve body pressures and swaps in different springs where needed to get the correct shift points. We watched him for a few minutes as he explained what he was doing and I firmly believe he knows more about valve bodies than the guys who design them! I can't even attempt to go into all the details he explained to us.



Another interesting note that kinda sucks; they rebuild a lot of the Bosch injectors and such for diesels, big room with all the special equipment and machines (easily 7 figures) to do this, but because they are considered a Bosch dealer, they can only sell these parts with in a 60 mile radius of the plant that is considered their territory by Bosch. :

Anyway that's all the pictures I have, sorry they suck. My camera quit cooperating so I had to use my phone.

 

[scottlang]

they flew us up there 2 years ago it was cool as hell fo sho

 

[ridered3]

Coolest shop tour I've seen thus far!