Shop Notes · Original Data
Marketing claims are adjectives; specifications are commitments. Since we tell every buyer to ask manufacturers exactly how their leak testing works, here is ours — the complete spec, published where anyone can hold us to it. Take it to any factory (including ours) and compare answers.
Coverage: 100% of production. Every single bus passes through the rain booth before delivery. Not first articles, not samples, not new-model validation units — every bus, every build, no exceptions. Workmanship varies bus to bus even on a disciplined line; only universal testing catches the individual bus's individual mistake.
Duration: 25 minutes per bus.
Water volume: approximately 7,500 gallons per test — delivered through nozzle arrays positioned to attack the vehicle's actual vulnerabilities: roof field and radius, roof-to-wall junctions, window lines, door perimeters, marker lights and penetrations, and the lift doorway. The intent is not to simulate weather; it's to exceed it — to force water at every joint the factory made, at volumes and angles no storm will match, while the bus is still ours to fix.
Inspection method: a person inside the vehicle for the full cycle. Lights on, actively hunting — ceiling lines, window tracks, door frames, floor edges, compartment interiors. Automated spray with an after-the-fact walkaround misses slow seeps and traveling water entirely; the inspector inside is the difference between a test and a rinse.
Pass criterion: zero water intrusion. A drip is a fail. There is no acceptable-leakage allowance.
Failure protocol: repair, then full re-test. A failed bus goes back for joint correction, then runs the entire booth cycle again — not a spot check of the repaired area. Water travels; only the full test proves the fix didn't move the problem.
Sequence: booth, then immediate road test. Every bus goes from the rain booth to the road, because body flex under real pavement is what exposes water sitting in a hidden channel that a static test can miss. The road test is part of the leak test.
Three reasons. First, accountability runs downhill from specificity — a published number is a standard our own line has to meet every day, and we like what that does inside the building. Second, buyers deserve a benchmark: leak testing is the single cheapest point in a bus's life to catch the defect that otherwise becomes a rotted floor and a corroded harness in year four, and the industry's practices range from rigorous to nonexistent with no way for buyers to tell — until they ask specific questions against a specific benchmark. Now there's one in public.
Third, honestly: we're proud of it, and pride you can't verify is just marketing. Visitors on factory tours watch the booth run. The spec above is the same one they see.
Whoever you're buying from, the comparison takes four questions:
Specific answers exist wherever real process exists — and every vague answer is also information. If this sheet makes one more builder publish their numbers, buyers win either way. That's a trade we'll take.
Every bus: 25 minutes and ~7,500 gallons in the rain booth with an inspector inside, zero-intrusion pass standard, full re-test after any repair, then an immediate road test.
No — practices range from 100% testing to batch sampling to none. Ask the four questions above and require specifics.
Yes — it's part of the factory tour. Ask us, or ask any builder to show you theirs; the answer is informative either way.