Last night HDTHR had a one hour show on Kawasaki's bike plant in Japan. Interesting to see their assembly line and their "human proof" automation setup. It was automated so that each bike being built had it's parts delivered, in the moment, for the specific model bike, to the specific worker, and if the part was not installed, meaning the part still in the bin, it shut down the assembly line, automatically. Also, for each bike, when fittings required a specific torque, each bike model and tq spec had a certain torque wrench to use. If the wrong TQ wrench was picked up, it shut down the line as well. The manuf plant manager said on average the line is shut down about 3 minutes per hour.

They almost came to show the bikes on the dyno and reving to ? RPM, but cut that portion before you could see how high they run up the RPM to log the power.

Each bike has a zebra code, and the dyno info goes into the 'file' on each bike and how it performed, so Kawa can look up any bike after it leaves the manuf and gets into the buyers hands... going back to the dyno and power info at the manuf.

Be nice if Kawa would be willing to provide that info to the buyers.

They also showed the race track they use in Japan, I believe it was on Kyushu.

My channel list was out, so I could not get the name of the show.

* Last updated by: JDC on 4/28/2009 @ 5:50 PM *

I would like to see that program. Kawasaki test track is called Autopolis and is located in south Japan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopolis

It was part of the Discovery HDT Twist The Throttle series.

http://turbo.discovery.com/beyond/?playerId=245988601&categoryId=1418496841&lineupId=1454928246&titleId=1454865196

Part three, of the Kawi program, has Autopolis.

Good show!

Thx Dogo

It was a great show to watch & to learn some more about the history of Kawasaki. I work in Auto Manufacturing so a lot of what they talked about made sense in regards to the manufacturing aspect of it. We also have a JIT (Just-In-Time) system for our parts - granted automobiles are a much larger scale than motorcycles. I was able to enjoy this from a rider's perspective as well as a worker's perspective, so it was a really great show.

In the past couple of weeks, I've caught the Ducati & BMW episodes. All of them were neat to watch & learn how these motorcycle "powers" came to be. I'd recommend these shows to any rider/fan of motorcycles.

DogoZX thanks for the link, because when I searched twist the throttle I got nothing.