31/08/2015
"Passionate, emotional, unique!"
"Passionate, emotional, unique!" - this is how the Business Division "Training" presented itself at the Voith Arena on Saturday 18 July 2015. This was the day when Heidenheim FC introduced their new second-division team and played against the first-division club Eintracht Frakfurt for the Liebhaber Cup. Frank Schmid's Heidenheim eleven won the cup with 2:1, after trailing behind with 0:1 at half time.
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- Zur Großansicht
- Klaus Walz Fotografie
Points were also scored by the Voith apprentices. Accompanied by Gerd Zimmermann, Erwin Krajewski and Matthias Lindemann, CFO of Voith Turbo, the apprentices introduced their latest "baby": The presentation of a white-blue-red (the club colors of FCH) Buggy was one of the highlights for the thousands of spectators at the soccer match. Gerd Zimmermann drove to the Voith Arena with three apprentices and the little racer. The sound of its engine even drowned out the ambient noise at the stadium - not really surprising, because all silencing components had been removed.
In his dual function as Member of the FCH Supervisory Board and CFO of Voith Turbo, Matthias Lindemann said a few introductory words about the Buggy project: "Under the expert supervision of their trainers, our apprentices have built a fully functional Buggy, which they dedicated to the FC Heidenheim. I am here today, because I am proud of this achievement of our Job Training Division."
The Voith Buggy puts 90 HP onto the soccer pitch. As a drive the apprentices used a VW-Bus engine, which had been tuned from 70 to 90 HP with Weber dual carburetors. With a weight of just 600 kg, the white-blue-red speedster therefore has enough power to be moved around in a very lively manner. To ensure that everything is safe, the Buggy has disc instead of drum brakes, hard stabilizers, a drop axle and harder shock absorbers.
Gerd Zimmermann described his motivation and thus made it clear how he and his team managed to master this project: "I am a great Buggy fan myself and a passionate hobby builder. And I thought, if this interests me so much, it might perhaps also grab our technology-loving apprentices - and this is precisely what happened. The Buggy met with great interest and my young colleagues joined in with enormous enthusiasm. We are all proud of the result and the fact that we are able to present it today in this fantastic setting."
The apprentices participating in the project (industrial mechanics, construction mechanics, cutting mechanics, mechatronics technicians, technical product designers and industrial clerks) built the car more or less from scratch. The basis of the Buggy is a VW Beetle chassis from the late 1960s. The end result is a stylish vehicle to represent Voith over the next few months in and around Heidenheim and at a number of away matches of the Second Bundesliga Division. But before we can see it on the road, it has to be approved by the TÜV. The aim is to get it registered as a vintage car and then drive around without hassle.
Matthias Wahl, second-year industrial mechanics apprentice, talked about his experiences: "All of us had enormous fun with the Buggy project and we have learned a lot. All we needed was a sponsor to whom we could dedicate the Buggy. And because the FCH is really a permanent conversation topic for the apprentices and trainers at the Voith Training Center, and many of us are great fans, we decided to build an FCH Buggy. And this served as an extra incentive to create a top-of-the-league Buggy."
For Erwin Krajewski, the project fits perfectly into the new Training Concept 2020. "The Buggy is a wonderful symbiosis of the four pillars of our job training: conveying technical competency, social competency, performance competency and emotional competency."
