Recurring Bellyache

Saturn's Fix

   On rolling farmland near Spring Hill, Tenn., where once a country estate called Haynes’ Haven raised walking horses, a mile-long manufacturing complex now produces a different kind of horsepower.   Built low behind grassy embankments to blend with its rural setting, this 6-million square-foot, totally integrated auto plant is the only place where Saturn vehicles are made from scratch — some 224,000 of them projected for 2001 — with all the major parts produced on site.  Rolled steel comes in at the north end while molten aluminum starts from the south end, and both emerge at the middle as complete automobiles.

     Making sure each one has an engine is a responsibility that ultimately traces back to the 80,000-lb aluminum melting furnace that feeds two casting lines, which can produce engine blocks and heads, respectively, at rates of up to 90 sets per hour.  Any failure here that would stop auto production would be financially disastrous, so the occasional downtime and cost of unplanned refractory repairs that typically were needed two to four times a year to keep the furnace running were always acceptable by comparison.   Now, those unplanned repairs have been all but eliminated by a new refractory formulation that, after three years of service, still shows no sign of deterioration.

     Trying new and different solutions is nothing new for Saturn Corporation, itself conceived as a new and different approach to auto making when founded in 1985. The Spring Hill plant’s foundry was the first large-scale production facility to use lost-foam casting technology, as developed by parent company General Motors in the late ...

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