Friday, 15 February (Part II)
Camp Tiffin — Red Bay, Alabama
First, current information about our whereabouts …
We left Red Bay on February 21 and are now in Montgomery, Alabama. We’re back at the Maxwell AFB FamCamp, where we plan to stay for the next two weeks. I’m hoping that a few uneventful days here will allow me to catch up on the rest of our Red Bay posts … the words are written, I just have to process photos.
After a morning spent getting the M3 service done on the Phaeton, we decided to do something other than sit around Camp Tiffin. After all, we were done with the service center and it wasn’t like we were going to get a call to take the coach into one of the bays.
Picking up a hand-drawn map from the camp store, we headed to Belmont, Mississippi — 6-miles (9.5 km) from the campground. Our plan called for lunch first, and then a tour of the Tiffin paint plant.
We’d been told that Belmont Café was one of the best places to get a bite to eat in the area — we were not misled. Good homestyle southern cooking.
(Belmont Café is on Main Street — #1 on the map above;
the Tiffin plant is on the corner of Dickinson Road and Hwy 25 — #3 on the map.)
antiques and quirky items decorate the inside of the Belmont Café.
The portions at Belmont Café are quite big; leftovers for dinner.
After lunch, we drove over to the Tiffin Paint Plant for a 
And so off we went to see how the coaches get their beauty treatment.
Google satellite shot of the Tiffin Paint Plant; the vehicles (top left) are coaches that have been painted.
The guardhouse where Mui received our visitor passes has the look of a gas station of yore.
Armed with passes, we set out to explore the paint plant where Tiffin coaches get a
custom paint job; pictured here is just a small portion of the plant.
Tiffin celebrated 40 years and 65,000 coaches in 2012.
From the office just inside the door, we picked up a laminated chart showing the process flow. As we made our way from the beginning to the end of the line, we were greeted warmly by Tiffin employees working on various stages of the paint process. Not only did everyone have a smile for us, they were also willing to answer any questions we posed. Their pride in the work they do was evident not only in their responses, but also in the repeated encouragement to go where we wanted. “Nothing to hide,” seemed to be the motto here. The exception to this open invitation was the paint bays and what I term the “baking” bays. Even then, the paint bays were viewable through windows.
The flow chart makes it easy to understand the sequence of the work done.
Tiffin does not use decals for the swirls and stripes that decorate the exterior of the coaches. Everything is done by hand, using patterns and masking tape galore. I have heard $10,000 to $12,000 per coach being bandied about as the cost of the custom paint job on the motorhomes. Having seen the work being done, I now understand why the five-day process to get a coach from no-paint to super-clearcoat is so expensive.
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Already primed, the windows, gaskets, and wheels are masked off before the coach
is sent in to the paint bay to receive its base color; the coach on the right is
in the paint bay (sorry about the smears from shooting through the window).
One of the things that struck us was the general age of the workforce. Can you say young? This is NOT because Tiffin is discriminating against those who are older. Rather, youth brings with it agility, not to mention better eyesight — both of which are essential to the detail-intensive work that is being performed in this part of the plant. I sure wouldn’t want to be sprinting from one end of the roof to the other, laying protective plastic sheeting … or spending hours on my knees, applying miles of masking tape … or going up and down ladders, taping protective paper to windows or marking off swirls and stripes for hours on end.
This coach is being prepared for striping. Can you believe these swirls are all masked off by hand? And then the tape has to be removed once the paint job is completed.
Being striped in the paint bay.
This coach has been striped, inspected for defects, and is being prepared for stripe repair.
As one young woman removes the old mask, another one starts putting on the tape for the repair.
We arrive at one of the clearcoat bays just as this coach gets pulled in for
the first of two clearcoat layers it is going to receive, and…
… get to watch the prep work before the door is closed.
as the two men get set up in the rolling scaffolding on either side of the coach,
The young man on the left mixes up the clearcoat in disposable buckets.
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The coaches are Baked (OK … the paint is cured) in bays like this one at temps averaging 165F (74C).
The instructions say that high temp is for “baking” and low temp is to keep the burner Going while
a coach is being loaded/unloaded. Oh and check out the high-tech timer on top of the panel.
Having received its super-clearcoat, the coach on the right is ready to leave the paint shop …
… and go to “final finish” to receive accessories, such as awnings, headlights, brake lights, etc.
That done, the coach will be ready to be shipped to a dealer near you!
And here’s what I found flabbergasting — the production rate here is 12 coaches per day! That’s up from the 3 units per day that were being produced at the end of 2008, which is when our 2009 coach was built.
Technically, we should have visited the paint plant after touring the factory where the motorhomes are built. The problem is that the factory tour is offered only once a day, and you can tour the paint plant anytime you want. So, keep your eye out for another tour coming soon.
(P.S. I understand you can do a self-guided tour of the factory as well, but we want to have words associated with what we will be seeing, so we’ve opted to wait until Monday morning.)
