Rockford Fosgate Factory Tour RTTI
RTTI is Rockford Technical Training Institute (or something like that). From what I remember, it was set up as a training program to show RF installers and salesman all the great features of RF product.
RTTI is also where all the top Rockford Corp. show cars you see at CES are built. Because of Rockford's OEM relationship with Nissan, you have seen quite a few of them in the booth.
One of the top cars at CES 2003 was the 350Z that has been featured in a few magazines. It was back at RTTI because while at the HIN show in Seattle, the rep was taking the car out to a show and the car went into limp home mode. Since the ECU was hidden under quite a bit of equipment, the car had to be taken to RTTI, taken apart and then have the offending piece of equipment sent to Nissan for repair. While it was being towed but, some knuckle dragging tow truck driver decided he would leave a nice grease stain on the white/light grey suede seat fabric. So the car was at RTTI getting worked on. Below are a few pictures.
Here is a picture of Mark Fukuda's world famous Blazer. This car is pretty much the last of the breed. Mark was one of the few guys who could win in SPL and SQ back during the car's prime. Mark retired about the same time that Alma Gates brought "The" Ford Broco onto the scene and pretty much changed the landscape. SPL cars became more and more specialized and it wasn't feasible to have cars do both competitions anymore. I also got a chance to talk to Mark and noticed that he had a Power 1000 in his office.
A couple pictures of the shop and some of the supplies. Just about everything they would need (even to build something like the 350Z), is easily at hand and very organized. Below are some of the many storage bins with parts of the 350Z in front of them.
Now here is the heart of RTTI, the fabrication room. You can see a bunch of jigs and patterns on the wall for various shapes.
Here is my Rockford rep with Mike Eckley (one of the guys who toiled for long hours with Jason Digos and Kyle Witherspoon) to get the job done. Here is a mold for a door panel. You take a mold of the door panel and you can be sure that the parts you are building will fit. Worse case scenario, if someone messes up a door panel, you can make a replacement much more quickly.
Here are multiple router tables, all with dust collection. Nothing sucks more than to have to change router bits in the middle of a job. So you can set it up to have different bits on each table for a complicated job, or the same ones on multiple tables to speed up a high volume job.
Alot of the stuff on the 350Z was actually machined out of aluminum. Making mistakes on aluminum are expensive, so they would have pieces made in wood first to make sure everything fit first, and then they would make stuff out of aluminum when everything lined up.
Why have one welder when you can get two?
Some pictures of the MB Quart Mercedes Compact they had featured in the booth at CES as well.
