David Houghton is the engineer in charge of GPS and surveying for Wright Brothers Construction Company.

Volkswagen’s new assembly plant in Hixson, Tennessee, a suburb of Chattanooga, represents an investment estimated at $1 billion. The facility is expected to create 2,000 jobs. Plans call for three interconnected buildings with 1.9 million square feet under roof. Of the 650 acres not occupied by structures, 240 acres would be made into parking lots. Production is slated to begin in 2011.

Site prep required moving about 6.5 million cubic yards of material. East Tennessee Grading, Inc. of Chattanooga was the prime contractor. East Tennessee brought in Wright Brothers Construction Company of Charleston, Tennessee as a subcontractor to help move material and lay base stone.

Specs for the grading performed by Wright Brothers were ± 0.25 inches for the building sites and ± 0.5 inches for the parking areas. Wright Brothers’ performance was easily within spec. “By using Topcon Millimeter GPS systems, we’ve held accuracy to one one-hundredth of an inch,” said David “Hootie” Houghton, the engineer in charge of GPS and surveying for Wright Brothers.

The Wright Brothers company arrived at Hixson with plenty of experience from similar jobs, including the Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire plant in Warren County, Tennessee; the Boeing facility for the manufacture of the Delta IV launch vehicle in Decatur, Alabama; and the General Mills warehouse in Chattanooga. They also arrived with experience specific to Topcon Positioning Products technology, having worked on five projects using Millimeter GPS in the three years preceding this project. They were able to bring about 70 percent of their fleet to the Volkswagen project, including 9 dozers, 8 excavators and a grader equipped with Topcon products. They also had several Topcon rovers on site. Wright Brothers used the rovers to log their volume to prepare their weekly billing.

Wright Brothers saved significant time with Topcon’s Millimeter GPS systems because their first pass was to grade. “There was no need for rough grading prior to bluetopping,” Houghton said. “Our first cut-and-fill brought us to the finished grade.” This was true not only with dozers and graders, but also with Topcon-equipped excavators.

Additional time savings came from the fact that no stakes were needed for grading. “With nearly 200 pieces of equipment on site, stakes would not have lasted long,” said Houghton. “We would have been replacing some percentage of them every day. In addition, we got minor changes every few days and major changes every week to 10 days. With the Topcon Pocket 3D we loaded the changes and everything was immediately updated instead of resetting 500 to 1,000 stakes every time. Going stakeless saved about 40 percent of a foreman’s time.”

Although Topcon tools are powerful, they’re also easy to learn, said Houghton. “New operators can run our Topcon-equipped machines in a matter of minutes,” he said, “and they can be cutting grade within a few hours.”

East Tennessee vice president Tony Boals said his company has used Topcon products for four or five years. “We have millimeter GPS systems on two graders and a D8 dozer,” he said. “We also have three rovers.” Both East Tennessee and Wright Brothers are serviced by the Knoxville location of Roper Laser, a Topcon dealer.

The economic potential of the Volkswagen development includes more than an assembly plant. Plans include a welcome center, which will be a scaled-down version of the Autostadt (“Car City” in German) center at the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. There will also be a low-speed test track, likely modeled after the one inside the Wolfsburg facility, where speeds are limited to 85 mph. VW already has a test track in the U.S. near Phoenix, Arizona.

Volkswagen is the third-largest car manufacturer in the world; only Toyota and GM produce more units. In 2007 the company launched an aggressive campaign to increase production nearly 30 percent by 2011. The Hixson campus will play a key role in that growth, which is good news in an area battered by heavy job losses in the traditional manufacturing, textiles, and home furnishings industries. The arrival of a global automotive giant and the constellation of second- and third-tier suppliers that will support it represents a tectonic shift in the local economy. It’s a shift that starts with moving dirt - lots of dirt - with precision.

Company: Wright Brothers Construction Company

Location: Charleston, Tennessee

Project: Volkswagen assembly plant
Location: Silverdale, Tennessee
Scope: Site prep required moving about 6.5 million cubic yards of material

Topcon Products: Millimeter GPS

Topcon Dealer:
Roper Laser
Knoxville, TN
www.roperlaser.com