Wayne Lifeguard
| Wayne Lifeguard | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Overview | |
| Manufacturer |
Wayne Corporation Wayne Wheeled Vehicles |
| Also called | Welles Lifeguard (Canadian market) |
| Production | 1973-1995 |
| Assembly |
Richmond, Indiana Marysville, Ohio |
| Designer | Wayne Corporation |
| Body and chassis | |
| Class | Type C (Conventional) |
| Body style |
School bus Commercial bus |
| Layout | 4x2 |
| Platform | see below |
| Related | Wayne Lifestar |
| Powertrain | |
| Engine | Gasoline Diesel |
The Wayne Lifeguard is a type C school bus built by Wayne Corporation, introduced in 1973. Produced until Wayne Corporation declared bankruptcy and was liquidated in late 1992, the Lifeguard was also produced by successor Wayne Wheeled Vehicles until their closure in 1995. The Lifeguard introduced new methods of design and construction for school buses to improve their safety in collisions.
In the late 1960s, a weak point and location of structural failure in catastrophic school bus crashes was considered to be body joints, the points where panels and pieces were fastened together. Longitudinal steel guard rails had been in use since the 1930s to protect the sides of buses, but behind them on the sides and on the roofs, manufacturers used many individual panels to construct a bus body.
Around 1967, safety engineers at Ward Body Works of Conway, Arkansas subjected one of their school bus bodies to a multiple roll test, and noted the separation at the joints. Ward engineers noted that many of their competitors were using far fewer rivets. This resulted in new attention by all body manufacturers to the number and quality of fasteners. To Wayne engineers, simply increasing the number of fasteners (rivets, screws, and huckbolts) was not satisfactory. In their own tests, the joints were always the weak point under high stress loads regardless of the number of fasteners. They also noted how the continuous guard rails used on the sides tended to spread the stress away from the point of impact, allowing it to be shared and dissipated at portions of the body structure further away. Instead of trying to figure out how to make the fasteners do a better job, the engineers stood back and wondered how the design features of the guard rails could be expanded. The result was a revolutionary new design in school bus construction: continuous longitudinal interior and exterior panels for the sides and roofs.
Branded the Lifeguard, Wayne's new conventional-style school bus design used the company's roll-forming presses to make single steel stampings that extended the entire length of the bus body. The concept was that by reducing the number of joints, the number of places where the body could be anticipated to separate in a catastrophic impact was reduced in a like amount. The "Lifeguard" design reduced overall body weight, the number of fasteners used, and man-hours required for assembly. However, the roll-form presses were very large, requiring special equipment to handle the finished panels. A more practical problem was the panels had to be cut to exact length for each bus body order, which varied with seating capacities and from state-to-state specifications. This created a marketing disadvantage as the Wayne factory required greater manufacturing lead time than in the past whereas the previous technology allowed for more interchangeability and customization in orders.
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Wikipedia