We’ve been showing and telling you about Bushwacker products for over ten years. In fact, Off-Road.com has featured their fender flares on no less than six project vehicles, including a Suzuki Samurai, Toyota Landcruiser FJ40, Isuzu pickup, Ford Explorer, S10 Blazer and a Chevy Silverado. In the May 2006 issue, we’ll put a set of custom-painted pocket-style flares on our current Project Chevy HD2500.

Why do we keep coming back to this company and their products, and why does it seem they keep popping up on every trail ride or trade show we cover? We headed to Portland Oregon recently, headquarters of Bushwacker Inc, to find out for ourselves. What a great way to spend a morning.

Since starting their reputation over 40 years ago with a set of Ford Bronco Fender flares, Bushwacker now also makes full TrailArmor packages, bedrails and tailgate caps. But fender flares are still their flagship product, with five distinct styles – Street flares, OE (Original Equipment) Style, Extend-a-Flare, Pocket Style and Cut-Outs. Most all of these styles are available for Chevy, Dodge, Ford, GMC, Nissan and Toyota, from Pickups to SUVs.

After Dealer Specialist Jeff Ayles installed the new flares on our Project vehicle, we walked the aisles of the plant with Operations Manager Rick Metro. We couldn’t help but be impressed with the more than 800 molds, carefully labeled and stacked to the ceiling. The manufacturing operation is a model of efficiency, able to crank a custom order out to a wholesaler like Quadratec or Transamerican Auto (4Wheel Parts Wholesalers) in 10 days or less. Their manufacturing model using timesharing of big CNC machines, allowing them to swap out parts with a set up time of barely 10 minutes, with each set of flares pressed and molded in 6 minutes. Product moves immediately to trim, holes are pre-drilled, flares packaged, boxed, labeled, and headed for a pallet. Ideally, an entire trailer load moves directly to a truck within a day or two.

This time of year, however, Rick admitted we were seeing more stock on the shelves than they’d like. With the busy spring show season, end customer buying is hot and their wholesalers place large orders at a time, so Bushwacker has to have hundreds of units ready to go to fulfill a single order. Product sitting is money uncollected, but it allows them to answer customer needs for standard items very quickly once an order is placed.

Trivia Question – Do the Chevy Tahoe and GMC Yukon share identical bodies, since they both roll out from GM? Answer - Nope! There’s about 12” along the body panel that must be shaped slightly differently for a fender flare to fit.

Everything at Bushwacker starts in the Engineering department. Engineering Manager John Hollen showed us how in a perfect partnership with an OEM, they receive full specs of every inch of the vehicle they will be building parts for. Sometimes, the one step missing is that information from the OE. It may be because the vehicle is still in pre-launch and they can’t or won’t release those specs until the last minute, or maybe it’s because Bushwacker isn’t an approved partner to the OEM or that specific vehicle yet. In that case, Bushwacker gets their hands on the vehicle as soon as possible and laser scans it themselves. Either way, they wave their magic CAD/CAM wand over it, drawing and redrawing and test-running the CNC machining to mold and trim the part virtually. The process is tested and debugged to perfection before a single sheet of AVS plastic is pulled from the stack. Pretty amazing stuff.

John showed us each step of the pattern process, from making a “splash” mold, to the epoxy and plug versions, and the final production tool. Most tooling is done at the Portland facility, though they do have resources in Wisconsin, Ohio and Washington State if they need them. And they might, with four new OE projects on the board by summer, and more than 20 new aftermarket products that will be available before next Fall.

Trivia Question – What is the tolerance allowed by Toyota Motor Corp between a fender flare and the body sheetmetal of a Rav 4? Answer – try 5/1000 th of an inch. That means if you can slip a business card between the flare and the body panel, it’s rejected. For Toyota to accept Bushwacker as their original equipment manufacturer, is a huge vote of confidence in their quality control.

This quality is reached with a tight organization of build Teams. Each manufacturing process follows a set of detailed Work Instructions created by the Engineering team. The Rav 4 fender Team, for example, has 57 pages of illustrated instructions, covering everything from basic workplace safety at each station to tool use and exact allowable specs. The Team Lead must sign off at several specific points throughout the process. That way, there are no surprises down the line and time and product are not wasted.

With all these hundreds of styles and thousands of sets of flares and bedcaps headed out from Bushwacker each year, we were surprised at the cleanliness and overall organization of the operation. From a manufacturing standpoint, there is little waste.

The edging of the plastic sheet that is trimmed after pressing, as well as the most-minute flecks left by the dremel tools, is ground up and shipped back to their supplier to be melted and formed again into sheets. This keeps their raw materials costs down, as well as reducing waste significantly. Portland is a very manufacturing-friendly city, but it is also very GREEN. For companies using plastics as heavily as Bushwacker, they have to constantly be thinking about recycling.

In the past year, customers have increasingly been asking for not only perfect-matching factory colors, but also custom colors. Their largest buyer in Florida does have a paint shop so has been filling most of their own orders, but Bushwacker saw the justification for an in-house paint shop and it’s been a very exciting addition for them. Now they are able to offer most OEM colors and custom color matching. For our Project, for example, we were thrilled to match our OEM color and have the flares delivered ready-to-install. Instant cool.

Their entire operation is 90 employees under one roof - from administration to manufacturing . Four walls, one break room (with a very cool purple-felt pool table!). After helping with the actual product install, Administrative Marketing Coordinator Sherri Ward showed us around the offices personally and introduced us to a very friendly, knowledgeable staff of sales, marketing and customer service.

For a product that takes only one hour to install, the tour and education of where it came from took most of a morning. Bushwacker has an impressive heritage of quality and innovation, and after shaking a few hands in person, we now know WHY we keep slapping the products with Off-Road.com’s seal of approval. Check out our Project HD2500 for further proof.

Thank you to the staff of Bushwacker for taking time out of their busy day to meet with us, and we look forward to seeing what’s new at SEMA 2006, next Fall.

-ptw