Category: Archives

At the Install

A couple of weeks ago, when I showed you all the different departments of employees here at Banks Engineering (at the Christmas party), I said I’d tell you more about the Install group in a week or two. Well, make it two.

I guess it should technically be called the Banks Factory Installation Center, but all of us here refer to it simply as Install.

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What Recession?

You can tell by the date of this column that Christmas was the day before yesterday. Last Friday, after I posted the Friday Night News, we held our big Banks Christmas party. And the emphasis—and this week’s news—is on BIG! My job was to take pictures with our digital camera of each department of Banks employees as they were called up on stage. I’ll post them here so you can see just how big we are. I’m talking number of individuals, not individual size of employees.

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The Jeeps are Coming

Two things this week. The primary news is that we are tooling up for a new line of Banks products for Jeeps. The secondary subject is the process of tooling up, otherwise known as prototyping.

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One Camaro to Go

At least one magazine calls them Pro Tourers: a new kind of hot rod with big wheels, very low-profile tires, big brakes, super-tuned chassis, a 5 or 6 speed manual trans, and plenty of horsepower. In other words, a hot rod that drives in something other than a straight line and for distances longer than a quarter mile—much longer.

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Banks Power for Workhorse

At close to 500 cubic inches, the GM 8.1L Vortec in the Workhorse chassis is already the most powerful gasoline motorhome going. So how did the Banks engineers figure out how to get 22% more power out of it? That’s 66 more horsepower and 77 more lb.-ft. of torque. They did it the way we always do—by building prototypes and testing them exhaustively to see what really works best in the real world.

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See Sidewinder Run

Seems like hardly a week goes by that we don’t have something new to tell you about Project Sidewinder. This one will be short.

The news is that we had a video crew at Bonneville to capture all the action and sounds surrounding our record attempts, and you can now sample it on our Sidewinder web site.

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Bob Robe

Bob Robe is a glutton for punishment. He’s worked at Gale Banks Engineering longer than any other current employee—this January will mark 25 years.

Seriously, Bob just told me that he couldn’t envision working anywhere else that would afford him the wide range of jobs that he enjoys here. To say that Bob is multitalented is a serious understatement.

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