Frame-Up: How Pierce Builds a Fire Truck Chassis

For the last few years Pierce has been trying to shorten the wait for a custom fire truck, and its newest chassis line is where the next cut is supposed to come from. "We've already reduced lead times by more than three months from their peak, and we expect this next phase will build on that momentum," Pierce president Marty Bass said in March, when the company opened the first phase of a new chassis line at its Appleton, Wisconsin, campus.

In Caledonia, Wisconsin, the village paid Pierce in full in 2023 for a truck costing more than $800,000. Two years later it was still waiting, and the company told the chief to expect about two more years.

"We won't see a replacement until the end of 2027, if not longer," Caledonia Fire Chief Walter Leininger told Spectrum News 1.

The new chassis line is the subject of the third installment in Pierce's series on its factory upgrades, which follows a chassis from bare rails through testing and inspection.

It starts with two rails

Each set of frame rails arrives at Pierce from a sister facility, already prepared for one specific apparatus. The frame-up crew positions the electrocoated (E-coated) rails, installs the structural components, prepares the axles and assembles the chassis. The chassis then gets its specified paint color and its final chassis systems before it's tested and inspected.

Every job is custom, so the paperwork has to travel with the truck. A manufacturing system called Truck Builder lists the tasks for each individual apparatus and lets workers sign off on each one as it's finished.

Ten steps to a rolling chassis

After frame-up, the chassis moves through assembly stations in a set order. The exact components, routing and installation requirements change with each customer's specification, according to Pierce.

Eleven stations and a meeting

The new High Flow Line (HFL) splits chassis assembly across 11 stations for now, and Pierce plans to add more as the line develops. Smaller chunks of work mean each operator has fewer tasks to concentrate on, and the line gets more points where someone can check the work before the chassis moves on.

Before each shift, people from production, design engineering, operations engineering, quality and materials meet to go over the work ahead. That's where a missing part, an engineering question or a supplier problem is supposed to surface, before a chassis is sitting at a station waiting on it.

Work instructions are getting more detail for specific apparatus options, along with pictures of how components go together. Fasteners, brackets, harness components and electrical connectors sit in central bins at each workstation.

One change is aimed at the operator's body. Driveshafts vary in size and weight, and operators used to muscle them into place by hand. A jack with a driveshaft attachment now lifts the shaft into position and holds it while the connections are made.

The money behind it

The chassis line is one piece of a $150 million modernization across Pierce plants in Wisconsin, Florida and Tennessee. According to the company, it has added more than 500,000 square feet of facility space, spent over $70 million so far and hired about 800 people. Pierce said later phases would convert the rest of final assembly in the second half of 2026.

Fabrication, where raw steel and aluminum are cut, bent and welded into chassis, body and aerial parts, has had its own upgrades. A new Cutlite Penta Fiber Plus Bevel 30-kilowatt (kW) laser cuts steel from thin to thick and adds weld bevels in the same pass, which saves work downstream. In a clip Pierce posted on Oct. 27, Ed Drengler gives a behind-the-scenes look at the machine.

"Automated fabrication machines help us improve efficiency and shorten the learning curve for new team members," said Vijay Kittuswamy, Pierce's senior director of operations engineering.

If your truck is on order

A custom truck still goes down the line built to its own spec sheet, and the stations now carry more of that spec in writing and in pictures. If your department has a Pierce on order, ask your dealer which phase of the new line your build will go through, and plan your own acceptance inspection around how your crews will use the truck.