User:SteveCof00/Wayne Lifeguard

The Wayne Lifeguard was a type C school bus built by Wayne Corporation, introduced in 1973. It was also produced by successor Wayne Wheeled Vehicles until their closure in 1995. The Lifeguard introduced new methods of designing the bodies of school buses to improve their safety in collisions.

Overview
A weak point and location of structural failure in catastrophic school bus crashes was well-known to be 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, all manufacturers were combining many individual panels to construct a bus body.

Around 1967, safety engineers at Ward Body Company of Conway, Arkansas had subjected one of their school bus bodies to a multiple roll test, and noted the separation at the joints. Ward noted that many of their competitors were using far fewer rivets. This resulted in new attention by all the body companies to the number and quality of fasteners.

Simply increasing the number of fasteners (rivets, screws, and huckbolts) was not enough to satisfy Wayne engineers. In their tests, no matter how many fasteners were used, the joints were always the weak point under high stress loads. They also noted how the continuous guard rails used on the sides tended to spread the stress from a 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, they stood back and wondered of 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, the new school bus design used Wayne's huge roll-forming presses to make single steel pieces which 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, it required the very large roll-form presses and special equipment to handle the 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. This created a marketing disadvantage as the Wayne factory required greater manufacturing lead time than when parts were more interchangeable between orders under older panel technology.

Shortly after Lifeguard was introduced, Wayne held a nationwide contest soliciting ideas to improve school bus safety, with a new Lifeguard school bus as the grand prize. The winning entry was submitted by a school bus driver in Goochland County, Virginia, whose district received the new school bus. Her idea was to install sound baffles in the ceiling of school bus bodies to help reduce driver distraction. Compact forms of such equipment were later developed used by Wayne and other school bus manufacturers when diesel engines (and their greater noise) became commonplace in the 1980s.

The benefits of the Lifeguard design were proved in several potentially catastrophic collisions. For example, in 1982, at Petersburg, Virginia, a 1973 model Wayne Lifeguard school bus transporting 41 elementary school children was struck broad-side at an intersection by a fire truck which had gone through a red traffic signal without stopping while responding to an alarm.
 * Benefits of Lifeguard design proved

The school bus was rocked violently, but after the fire truck literally bounced off of it (rather than penetrating the body), the driver was able to regain control and bring it to a safe stop. The fire truck was spun 180o and its front was demolished. All 3 firefighters were hospitalized. The bus driver and all children were transported to the hospital as well. One child on the bus had suffered a broken arm; the rest were mostly scared but uninjured.

Later examination of the school bus revealed that the impact of the massive fire truck had failed to overcome the great strength of the Wayne Lifeguard construction and the guard rails. It also revealed how well made the Lifeguard was and the quality of materials and workmanship. Investigators were amazed to discover that despite a bulge of several inches on the longitudinal interior panel, there had been no all-the way through penetration of the passenger compartment whatsoever, no joint separation, and no sharp edges created. Instead, they found the substantial impact stress had been shared over a widespread area along the entire structure of the passenger compartment "box", protecting the occupants as intended by the design.

In the years after Wayne introduced the Lifeguard in the 1973 model year, competing body manufacturers began also using larger panels and a lesser number of side panels and joints. However, none had become as progressive as Wayne's use of the full-length panels when the focus on structural integrity resulted in the joint requirements of the all-important U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for school buses, most of which became applicable on April 1, 1977. After that date, most manufacturers including Wayne added special structural adhesives to other fasteners at body joints

Manufacturing
The Lifeguard was produced in Wayne's Richmond, Indiana production facility. Canadian subsidiary Welles produced the Lifeguard in Windsor, Ontario until the bankruptcy of Wayne Corporation in 1992.