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Chapter 35

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Chapter 34: A Higher Standard 

It is difficult for me to say anything negative about Frank DeBono. I always believed he was a good man. I always liked him. His Brother Vic did as much for me at Ford as anybody did and sometimes put his neck on the line to do it. I worked with Frank DeBono’s daughter Colleen on the Highlight. I’ve never known a finer human being.  

Charles Purnell’s experience with Frank DeBono was not the same as mine. I will not try to explain it. I won’t even say what Charles told me Frank said to him. I’ll just say what I saw, what I couldn’t help but to see because his job was right next to mine.  

I saw Purnell working on a Mustang console. I saw him planning his work carefully and expertly. I saw a true, seasoned craftsman doing his job diligently. Whenever we went to lunch together I had to wait for him and he always wanted to get back sooner than I did.  

I saw Frank DeBono easing a talented rookie modeler named Greg Kurus into Purnell’s job. I saw Kurus reluctantly taking over the consol from Purnell without knowing why Frank told him to do it. I saw the poor performance review that Frank DeBono gave Charles Purnell. 

Little did I know that I was going to be subjected to the same treatment five years down the line.  

Meanwhile I got paired with Walid Sabba again, this time to do a steering wheel that would cut across all Ford car lines. Walid seemed to be a changed man. We worked well together and the design of his steering moved along at a swift pace. In not time, we had a corporate steering wheel that was beautiful, imaginative, and feasible. This accomplishment didn’t sit well with our Director, Dave Reese, who pulled the same game with Walid that Fritz played with Melvin Betencourt to put Walid in his place. He took away the elements that made the steering wheel unique and imposed arbitrary conditions that torpedoed it. No way was a rookie designer going to get credit for doing anything that important that well. 

We made a remarkable recovery but this time Fritz shot it down because when he came in to review it he spied another steering wheel among half a dozen others on a nearby table that he liked better. He pointed to it and said, “I want that one.” He didn’t know who designed it and he didn’t care. It fit his vision of what a corporate steering wheel should look like.  

Emiline King designed it.

Instead of using Emiline’s model and refining it, Dave Reese decided to duplicate here steering wheel and make the refinements on Walid’s model. The result was to rob Emiline of all the credit for the design, to give Walid partial credit and to give the most credit to Dave Reese.  

I would see the same thing happen to a young white female designer name Cici with the instrument panel she designed and Calvin modeled for the ’98 retro T-bird. It would happen again to her brother Todd and me as an electronic math modeler on the 2000 Mustang exterior. This was the wave of the future for Ford design. Ford would choose the people and the processes it wanted to look good and reshuffle the deck until it had them in place to succeed. It was also an effective way of downgrading the people and the processes it didn’t want to succeed…. 

Shortly after Ford dismantled Concepts and sent Greg Arceri to supervise the interior and exterior of the ’94 Mustang at the Roush facility in Allan Park, I joined him. Howard Thompson, Dean Zimmerman, Charlie leak and Don Painter were there ahead of me. The company sent Cal Morrison and Dennis Phinney to another studio. Mike Wyman and Emory Seveges went with Mimi and Janet to a new Concepts studio.  

I met a black contract modeler at Roush in his late 40s named Bob who had kicked around in the business for many years. His experience showed in the high quality of his work but he couldn’t explain way he wasn’t able to land a permanent modeling job anywhere. I couldn’t explain it, either. He had a quiet disposition, a pleasant personality, excellent work habits, job knowledge, etc. Ford let him go when his contract expired and hired a young, white modeler instead.  

My first job at Roush was on a Mustang consol that I started in the Concepts studio. The last time I saw the console it was about as rough as it could get. I had refused to do anything with it until I had a pattern called a “footprint” from engineering that matched the front end of the consol and the instrument panel that it was supposed to flow into. You could model a glorious IP and a glorious console but as soon as you tried to put them together without a common footprint you would have to change both of them, which meant that you would have wasted your time in designing and modeling both of them.  

The console was exactly as I left it two months earlier. Again, I asked the engineers for a footprint before I started modeling. To my astonishment, my request touched off a flurry of activity to create one. This was a bad sign. Moving to Roush was supposed to be a big improvement over the way we did things at the Design Center. Only a door separated the design studio from a sprawling department with scores of engineers assigned to Mustang. But a host of practical and political considerations kept the designers modelers and engineers from walking thought those doors freely to resolve design and engineering conflicts as they arose.  

By asking the first engineer I saw about the footprint instead of going to the designated Studio Engineer, I was violating territorial prerogatives I didn’t know existed. The engineer I should have asked got so incensed when he found out about it that he screamed at me, stalked away and refused to have anything more to do with me. Soon after that incident I saw the same engineer in a screaming match with another modeler…and another…and another. Those modelers refused to have anything to do with him. Within a few weeks of my arrival at Roush, he retired and I got the footprint I asked for. 

In the meantime I had to model the console just to keep from appearing to be uncooperative. It was worse than a waste of time. It was counter productive. A terrific designer named Ara, with whom I had worked before, had introduced some design elements that we thought were compatible with the center-stack of the IP. Dave Reese liked the model so much that he insisted on adding his own personal touches.  

If the model had not appeared to be well beyond the roughing stage he wouldn’t have done it because he wouldn’t have had the design elements he liked to work from. Now we were stuck with design elements on the IP and the console that our Director was determined to keep. 

I cut out the footprint on Masonite and used it to trace two identical footprints on thin sheets of acetate. I calculated the necessary angles on the front end of the console and put one acetate shoeprint where it had to be. I put the other shoeprint where it had to be on the instrument panel.  When I rolled the console into place on the IP, the shoeprints should have matched line for line. They didn’t.  

I had to do some fancy detective work to find out what caused the mismatch so I could tell which shoeprint to throw away. I discovered that the IP and the consol design had changed so much independently that the engineers didn’t have the current information to define the shoeprint correctly. I had to throw out both shoeprints. And the engineers had to calculate a new one.  

None of this nonsense would have been necessary if the same modeler was doing the console and the IP together. Greg Arceri and our Studio Executive Daryl Beemer had nothing to do with it. The console was an on and off proposition. Dean Zimmerman was modeling the IP when the product planners decided that we needed the consol to tie into it as it was originally planned. Dave Reese wanted to see specific elements of both jobs in progress at the same time, so Greg assigned the console to me.

Dean piled up points with Dave Reese big time on the IP because he responded instantly to every “little” change Reese wanted to make and modeled a thing of beauty every time. I lost points because I had to follow the changes Dean made to the surface that set up the footprint, and the “little” changes to the center-stack lines that made the IP look better made the console look worse. Indeed, those lines created a jog at the point where they were supposed to flow into the consol.   

In other words, Dean ignored the very concept of a shoeprint along with everything it implied to give Dave Reese what he wanted to see when he wanted to see it.  

If I couldn’t keep up with those changes our acting Studio Engineers, Jerry Hovey, certainly couldn’t. He couldn’t keep up with anything because none of the interfaces on any of our properties matched up the way they were supposed to.  

We went around in circles with the console for so long that it eventually became obvious to everyone that my time would have been better-spent dong something else. Greg reassigned me to the Mustang Exterior. From a distance, The Master Modeler, Cecil Crider, and his crew seemed to have things well in hand. But when I got on the job I saw how close to the edge of chaos everyone was dancing on.  

Coming in with a fresh eye, I could see how to fix some problems with a combined windshield and roof molding that the designers wanted to be round in the upper corners of the windshield. The engineers said the molding had to be square in the corner and they couldn’t get the edge of my molding to line up with their data, although I used their data to do it.   

Figuring out how to round the corner of the windshield was relatively easy. But when I made the molding and put it on so that it extended the way it had to from the windshield to the back glass, a man from an outside firm called Lear digitized it and the data didn’t match. I did it three times. All thee times Jerry Havey came back to me with an electronically recorded readout showing my molding in the wrong place. He thought I was incompetent because he believed the problem was with the way I did it. I thought that he was incompetent. I knew the molding was correct. I had overheard him double talking his way thorough a meeting in which he couldn’t gives straight answers to tough questions so I thought he was trying to double talk me.  

Cecil Crider thought that my way should have worked but he did it Jerry’s way to stop our fruitless arguments. He got the same discrepancy that I got and the line he ended up with was erratic. Howard Thomson also tried it Jerry’s way and got Crider’s unacceptable results. 

Charlie Leak had to redo the front end that he was working on every time it got scanned. Jerry thought that Leak was incompetent, too. I knew better. So did a top-notch draftsman named Dick Furnier who worked with Leak on a complicated A-pillar. Furnier said that he knew Master Modelers who couldn’t do what Charlie Leak did. He said that only an outstanding modeler could have.  

The molding and the front end had three things in common. People who knew what they were doing sculpted them. The man from Lear or a contract modeler named Rex working under his direction scanned them. They scanned them on the driver side of the car.  

When Jerry took his own points on both sides of the car he discovered that his baseline data matched the passenger side but not the driver side. The scanner wasn’t calibrated correctly to the driver side.  

The ’84 Mustang was the first vehicle Ford attempted to design with its version of simultaneous engineering. Will Body, the Program Manager, determined that he could cut down lead time and assure better fit and finish buy assembling a prototype and sticking to the inner structure of the prototype in the final design. In most cases it did what it was supposed to do. It imposed disciple on the designers and it told the engineers where they were – theoretically. But unlike what we did in Concepts by making our working models amenable to change where change was necessary, the prototype locked us in and some things the engineers thought were necessary weren’t. 

I could see how to mount the outside mirrors in the junction of the A-pillar and the belt line called a “sail,” instead of on the fender where the engineers said it had to go. The engineers showed me how to do it by showing me drawings of parts that had to be configured in a particular way and the prototype structures they had to work around, which they though made it “impossible.”  

Every time the engineers pointed out something about the sail-mounted mirrors that created wind noise, attachment problems or a big rat hole in the corner, I saw something else that could solve the problems. They couldn’t do it because the only way it could be done was to redesign the mirror in a way they couldn’t imagine. The designers didn’t want to change the sail-mounted mirrors they proposed so I reengineered and redesigned it myself in a way that conformed to the design intent as well as matching the feasibility requirements. Design bought the design. Whether the engineers engineered it the way I did, I don’t know, but with the model and the drawings to show that it could be done, they did it.  

Things appeared to be going extremely well at Roush.

Fritz Mayhew was so happy with the process that he made a special visit to Roush in the summer of ’91 to congratulate everyone and to tell us how our work fit into the big picture. The real reason for his visit became apparent when he called the modelers into a conference room to talk to us. Another union drive was heating up. That’s why most of us believed the company was setting up studios like ours at Rouse and hiring so many white, male contract modelers – to separate the potential trouble-makers and to skew the voting pool in its favor. New hires, especially young, white men, were overwhelmingly antiunion. Now I knew why Ford didn’t hire Bob, an older black man. 

Everyone seemed content to let Fritz give his rah-rah speech and leave so we could get back to work. We nodded in all the right places and did our best to suppress giggles and groans when he said something ridiculous. He didn’t care about the details of what we had to do to get our jobs done, which was okay. It wasn’t okay with Howard, Cecil and Dean when he started talking about how much easier it was for the modelers to function away from the Design Center and away from interference from upper management. They had to jump though hoops to set up the studio under primitive conditions and being away from the shops meant that we had to make frequent trips to the Design Center to do the simplest things. 

Then Fritz touched on a detail that revealed the depth of his ignorance and the distorted prism threw he saw the countless trouble spots modelers had to identify and correct. He said, “…and everything fits.” 

Don Painter could hold his tongue no longer. He said, “No it doesn’t.” 

Fritz would not have announce to us, of all people, that the new process was functioning as it was planned to function if he didn’t believe it was true. Nobody likes to look foolish and nobody in a position to know what was going on could have fed him the bogus information he fed back to us that made him look extraordinarily foolish.  He could have gotten it only from Dave Reese and his own superficial observations. It was as though he had forgotten everything he learned about the hundreds of “little” things clay modelers did every day to fill the gaps between theory and reality. Then again, he was never big on that aspect of the process. He wouldn’t have made it where he was in the company if he had been.  

The PDMS machines we were using in place of standard bridges and brown line drawings put a new wrinkle in our old problems. Jerry Hovey’s discovery of why we had to redo the roof molding and the front end so many times should have told me the whole story.  

I still didn’t see why Cecil, Howard, Charlie or I didn’t figure out the cause of the problem long before Jerry did until I put the question to Howard. He reached down to a pile of paper of various sizes and picked up a curled one that looked like it came off of an old fashioned adding machine. I uncurled it and tried to make sense out of the rows of numbers that were carried to four places past the decimal point to indicate a fraction of a millimeter of one coordinate.   

“What does that tell you?” asked Howard.  

By studying the numbers closely I could discern a shape that seemed to conform to what Charlie Leak was doing with the surface around the turn signal. I had to use the two digits past the second decimal point to figure out what the second point – the last useful one in that four-digit string – should be[1]. When I did that, I still didn’t have anything useful. 

I said. “This doesn’t tell me a damn thing.” 

Howard picked up another scroll with more numbers on it. This time I didn’t bother to round off the numbers. They were all just numbers on odd scraps of paper torn from a machine. That was Howard’s point.  

He led me to an obsolete drafting table that was cluttered with more scrolls. They couldn’t be systematically arranged because they didn’t have a uniform shape or size and you needed stretch them out to lay them flat. I had to invent a special board with a sliding bar just to read them.  

Howard said, “We used to have drawings that we could go to and see where everything was. If something didn’t look right in one view you could grab a pair of dividers and check it out in another view. You had point sheets that were all the same size. You could lay’em flat and see what you were doing. Now all that information is in a computer.” 

Howard pointed to the draftsmen working under dark, cardboard hoods so they could read their computer screens better.  

“If you want something from them, they gotta run it off on a printer and they gotta give you two piece of paper for you to see what you used to be able to see on one. The thing of it is, you never get a drawing you can lay out across at table like this. You never see the whole picture. You’re bound to miss a lotta shit you used to be able to see, ‘cause you can’t see it until you try to put it together.” 

I carried Howard’s words of wisdom with me thinking that I would one day be able to put them to good use… Boy, was I wrong.

My next assignment set me on a circuitous path out of design and into engineering, the last place I wanted to be at Ford. I wanted to be a Master Modeler. I had a “work plan” to reach that objective. When the previous Master Modeler promotion list came out, I wasn’t on it. My new assignment didn’t look as though it would help to get me on the next one. 

In two days, I had to repair and modify a painted “starfish ”wheel, which had broken loose from the rim and cracked badly. I had to do it without Jim Biondo’s wheel spinning fixture and it had to look good enough to compare in a Design Center show with a dozen wheels that had been sculpted to perfection over several weeks. I couldn’t work over the paint and I couldn’t strip it off of the clay so I had to start from scratch.  

I pulled it off. Fritz Mayhew and some shooters for the Glass House chose the starfish as one of the finalists for the three or four wheels that would go on the production car. I remained at the Design Center along with two of the modelers who did the other winning wheels to do feasible versions of them. Somehow I ended up modeling all of them with Mike Arbaugh as the designer and a draftsman named Nyle Sterna.  

Mike, Nyle and I communicated honestly and easily with respect and consideration for the others’ responsibilities. I didn’t fight Mike when he said he had to make a change that was inconvenient for me. He didn’t fight me when I told him that I had to modify his design and Nyle went the extra mile to keep his math model surfaces true to the clay.  We were therefore able to do everything we had to do with optimum results.  

Our crowning achievement was a feasible version of a Bud Magualdi wheel with six pipes paired in a three spoke pattern running from the hub to the rim. Bud’s wheel had an appealing brutish quality that we couldn’t keep because he achieved it by doing something in the clay that couldn’t be done in cast aluminum. Fritz took a special interest in Arbaugh’s design and told us to do another one for a 19-inch wheel. He needed it to show on the Mustang in less than a week.  

You don’t fully comprehend the delicate balance of lines and contours that make the difference between a good design and a bad one until you run into something like this. The geometry of three-dimensional forms expanding from a hub that couldn’t change and a rim that had to change looked decidedly inferior. No, it was flat out ugly.  

I had to design and model the 19-inch wheel to make it look like the one Mike Arbaugh designed for the 16-inch wheel. When Fritz told me to do it, Arbaugh didn’t complain. Our time was too short and the adjustments had to be made from moment to moment. Nyle couldn’t do it because his 2-D screen couldn’t give him a true 3-D view and the new ICEM-Surf program he was working with did not allow him to apply his decades of drafting experience. I didn’t know if he had the aesthetic sensibility to do it, anyway.

I had to work though lunch the day before the show to have it ready. Dave Reese passed through the studio when I was setting a template. I thought nothing of seeing him. What he thought of seeing me is what would matter. 

Fritz wanted an “inside-outside” Mustang fiberglass model. Casting the exterior was a straightforward proposition. Everybody knew what to do and what to expect. Getting the interior panels to match the exterior shell was not so easy. That job fell to me because our Roush studio wasn’t big enough to house the fiberglass model and the inner panels for the roof, the doors and the pillars. In addition, we had a sedan roof and a simulated convertible one, which we had to switch during the show. 

This was the job I thought would put me over the top for my second Outstanding performance review. Greg could have sent his outstanding Master Modeler Ron Grizwack to the Design Center to lead the job. Only a conventional modeler of his caliber could have pulled it off. The fact that I pulled it off, leading as many as 12 modelers at one time in as many different projects should have sealed the deal. It didn’t.  

During the show Dave Reese approached my roof changing crew consisting of Dean Zimmerman, Chuck Lukas a young modeler named Roy Roy Jr. and me. He turned to Zimmerman and said to the chagrin of my entire crew, “Dean, have your men change the roof.”  

What does that tell you? 

Greg gave me an O for everything I did in Components, Concepts and Mustang. Dave Reese wanted to lower it, which would have taken me out of the running for Master Modeler. Greg pressed his argument in my favor until he said something that triggered a meaningful memory for Dave Reese. I got the O because Dave Reese remembered seeing me work through lunch on a wheel.  

The way I got my second O told me that I wasn’t going to get another one unless I stayed with Arceri and did something so transparently over and above what other O’s were doing that it spoke for itself.  

Dave Connelly and Phil Hussar were learning how to use ICEM-Surf. Mike Horni had recently introduced the math modeling system to Ford. It was based on surface manipulations with sophisticated diagnostic tools built in to give it the potential for generating, changing and checking the quality of surfaces better than PDGS could do it. In the hands of a knowledgeable modeler, it seemed to me that Ford could accomplish much more than it could with the system in the hands of draftsmen and engineers. It also seemed to me that I could pile up a lot of points by getting in on the ground floor of this technology’s new application to Ford design. 

If the objective of using ICEM-Surf was to improve quality and reduce lead-time, who better than modelers to decided when and how to apply it? As a former outstanding modeler who was now an outstanding engineer, Mike Horni stuck me as being the best possible selection to lead a department set up to use it.  

I knew, from talking to Nyle, Connelly and Hussar that ICEM-Surf was inherently flawed in its current state of development because they had such a difficult time trying to learn how to use it. They complained about menus inside of other menus they had a hard time finding to do the simplest things and the number of steps they had to take to find and eliminate surface flaws. If they could have used what they knew about surface development, those flaws would not have existed.  

Draftsmen and engineers in general learned how to use ICEM-Surf faster than modelers. I expected that pattern to change when Ford realized what the modelers using ICEM could do when they had a greater say in the software’s development. I wanted to be one of them. 

An ongoing problem with ICEM-Surf was the need to build a clay model and digitize it using points taken with a PDMS machine. The PDMS operators were rarely knowledgeable enough to take points in the right places on the models to duplicate the surface contours faithfully. ICEM surfaces were therefore rarely the same as the models and the math modelers had to go back to the models frequently to identify and to correct the discrepancies.  

Mike Horni and I talked about these breakdowns in the ICEM-Surf math modeling process. He was looking beyond the current state of the technology to what it could become and I agreed with him.  

I suggested that I make a “point-map” on a clay model door with thin strips of tape on horizontal and vertical door sections where possible and wherever else they were necessary. I would then dot the tapes where a point needed to go to define the surface faithfully. Too many points were bad because small errors in one or two of them could lead the electronic math modeler to make the wrong choices in which ones to us. Too few were bad because you needed the right number in the right places to define the surface and to identify inevitable bad points.

Experienced modelers knew precisely where each point had to go to duplicate a surface using the points alone. If you put the points in the right places the right surface had to follow them.  If you missed some here or there it didn’t matter because the only way the surface could flow correctly from the correct points would tell you where the incorrect ones were. The new surface could deviate from the old one by as much as five or six millimeters depending on where they deviated. Deviations mattered only if the person who put in the second surface wasn’t as competent as the person who put in the first one. With clay modelers doing the math model surfaces it wasn’t an issue.  

Remember the two useless decimal places after the last useful one in the scan data Howard Thompson showed me to illustrate why we went around in circles for so long?  Hold that thought. 

We tried the point-map with the door. It didn’t work.  

ICEM-Surf used a combination of rectangular patches to generate surfaces. Not all of the points ICEM required to blend those surfaces seamlessly were on the map and the points that were on the map baffled the best ICEM users. Instead of using the points that defined the real surface, they looked for points to create a patch structure the ICEM-Surf program could use to create a theoretical “class-A” surface. A class-A math model surface measured the worst “flaws” in the patch boundaries to tolerances of 5/1000ths of a millimeter.  

In other words, ICEM-Surf dictated the use of points that were not needed to define the real surface and the best ICEM-Surf users could not interpret the ones that did. To tell them whether the surface patches were flowing correctly into each other, they used a “curvature plot,” a theoretical projection of the surfaces, which looked like the dorsal fin on a swordfish. The shape of a theoretical line on the curvature plot connecting the spikes told them how good the surface was.  

All I new when the point-map experiment failed was that the ICEM-Surf expert Mike sent to work on it with me didn’t understand how my points defined the door surfaces the way Mike and I did. I thought that any reasonably intelligent person could be taught in a short amount of time. Mike didn’t think that was the answer because the people doing most of the scanning were strictly technicians with no stake in learning how to do anything more than better ways to run the machines. Most of them weren’t even Ford employees. The trend was to set the scanners to take more points automatically at closer, predetermined intervals.  

I pointed to areas on the model door where that approach would miss critical spots if the intervals were set too far apart and pick up bad information along with the good if they were set too close together. Mike pointed out that he had little control over how the models were going to be scanned and who would decide how to do it. Al Biggs already had more say over that short of thing than Mike did.  

Al’s scanning and milling empire was growing and the company was banking on advances in electronic design and full surface milling to eventually replace hand modeling altogether. Mike’s best bet was to add his voice to those who were pressing for better scanning and milling equipment and better software programs to run them. Educating scan operators and electronic math modelers in basic aesthetic principles was not on that agenda…. 

I signed up for an ICEM-Surf class but Greg told me that the class was full. I signed up for the next class but by then I had been transferred to another studio and Joe Seibold, my new Supervisor, said that no modelers were being accepted into the class at the time.  

Somehow, somebody made an exception for Dave Patella, a Ford modeler for two years and the son my leader at American Motors, Jerry Patella. When I found out that I signed up for the class before he did I told Joe and he enrolled me in the next available ICEM class.  

It was the wrong class. 

I found myself at the Ford Training Center studying ICEM-DDN. This ICEM software package had some math modeling features but they did not work the way ICEM-Surf worked. DDN was primarily a milling program. It had nothing to do with the creative aspects of surface development. If you became an expert in DDN you could set a milling machine’s cutter paths to turn somebody else’s ICEM-Surf data into clay models but your creative modeling days were over. You were buying into a process where your only function was to serve a machine. How well you served it determined your value.  

My only reason for wanting to learn ICEM-Surf in the first place was to increase my value as a creative modeler. I completed the DDN class but when I went back to the Large Car studio I told Joe what had happened and that I wanted no part of DDN. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to contribute to Large Car, either.  

When I first checked in I saw the man Dennis Moses called his “stealth modeler” in Probe because he had such a hard time finding him. He was also the man who modeled the Mustang starfish wheel I had to repair and modify. He said, “Shit. Now they’re going to expect all of us to work to a higher standard.”

I laughed, thinking that he was joking. But he spun around, stalked away and pouted for the rest of the day. He wasn’t kidding but if that’s what he thought of me compared to him and the rest of the Large Car modelers, it didn’t make sense for him to say it. The studio was loaded with modelers who worked to the highest standards.  

Large Car had Dennis Phinney, Vic DeBono, Dave Hackett, Bill Wight and Tony Paladino, all of whom were Master Modelers, as well as Cal Morrison, Bennie DeNaro and George Green who should have been. It had Charlie Leak who I knew was top-notch because I had seen him in action on so many difficult projects in Small Car.  

Charles Purnell was also in Large Car. I knew he was good but I wouldn’t learn that he was a better planner and a better craftsman with a better eye for design than Dave Hackett until I saw them going head to head on a wheel program in our new studio.  They started out together, turning out one wheel after another with Hackett as the leader. As always, it looked as though Dave Hackett was ahead at first. I knew better because of all the wheels I had done. Hackett would have to make more time consuming changes before his wheels were approved for final casting, leaving him less time to achieve the quality of finish that Charles could achieve. Although the designs of Hackett’s wheels were less demanding than Purnell’s, Purnell soon surpassed him. 

It didn’t look as though it was going to turn out that way because the first wheel Charles did was a disaster. He set it up like a pie sliced in six identical wedges. He made one wedge and built a clay damn around it to cast all six parts. But when the wedges came back from the Plastic Shop they were warped. One side of each wedge was higher than the other side and the walls were not perpendicular so they couldn’t come together in an evenly matched circle.  

Joe Seibold was appalled. He couldn’t see how it was possible for the Plastic Shop to have screwed up that badly so he accepted the shop Supervisor’s claim that the original part, destroyed in the casting process, was to blame. I knew everybody in the Plastic Shop. Only one man there could have produced a mess like this by setting up the rubber mold incorrectly, mixing the plastic to “hot” and taking it out of the mold too soon. If Joe Seibold had ever dealt with him he would have known that this was his work, not Purnell’s.  

If Joe had been more sensitive to the pressure the Plastic Shop was under to protect its reputation and better informed about Purnell’s wheel-making experience in German, he would have known what the deal was. Charles did all of the wheels for Ford’s ’94 European cars. That’s why Hackett asked Purnell to help him with the new Taurus/Sable wheels. That’s why Hackett stood up for Purnell when the urethane pie wedge came back the way it did.  

Joe didn’t buy Hackett’s assurance that Purnell was a competent modeler. The urethane pie wedge and the mold it came out of was Joe’s proof that he wasn’t. Joe allowed Purnell to continue working with Hackett but he never believed that Purnell did all of the Taurus/Sable wheels on his own…. 

I had a fight of my own. Joe Seibold was a fair-minded man. I didn’t now whether that was good or bad for me because of his uncanny way of walking by for the past fifteen years when I was in the middle of doing something that no decent modeler would be proud of. I had to stay on my toes every minute to be sure that didn’t happen again. I worked on exteriors and interiors. I even worked through the ’91-’92, Christmas-New Year holiday to show that I was willing to do it – although I hated it and knew that it was a total waste of time.  

I did an instrument panel and doors for a young designer named Mike Webb who didn’t cheat and a young designer named Sung Kim who did.  

Sung Kim was another Walid Sabba, a rich kid with the artistic flare of Salvador Dali and the political ethics of Machiavelli. Calvin called both of them “The Prince.”  

Mike's IP and doors are what you see on the road. Sung got all of the credit because he started with a design that looked better than Mike’s. It looked better because he ignored every feasibility constraint that got in his way. It also looked as good as it did because he complained to the Studio Executive that his modeler wasn’t good enough for him. He saw what I was doing on Mike’s job and asked for me. His request was good for me. It’s always good when a star designer or a rising star designer asks you to model his design. It’s like getting picked first for kickball in the third grade.  

Whatever Sung wanted he got until his IP and doors beat out Mike’s and he had to start making it feasible. Bit by bit they looked more like Mike’s until the finished models looked almost identical to the ones Mike started with. Given the design direction that Fritz Mayhew, Dave Reese and the Studio Executive John Dowdy gave both of them go in, it was inevitable. 

I felt badly about my part in what happened to Mike Webb and the unfair performance evaluation system that allowed it to happen. I had written a letter to Red Poling in the spring of 1991 advising him of the dishonest and deceptive practices that were lowering morale and taking the company backward. He couldn’t see it then. Everyone could see it now.