Hans Joachim Pahl

Hans J. Pahl is a German automotive engineer, who worked a couple of years as a design engineer in a medium sized company which specialized in special purpose vehicles – mainly heavy duty trucks for oil fields and airfield fire engines. Then he worked 15 years in the R&D department and as a product developer with ContiTech Luftfedersysteme GmbH, a leading air spring manufacturer in Europe. In 2002 he was publicly appointed and sworn-in by the chamber of engineers of lower saxony and he works as an expert for vehicle technology and as a traffic accident investigator. In addition to his professional activities Hans J. Pahl has been riding motorcycles for more than 45 years now and since more than 20 years he owns a Yamaha XS 650 with a mileage of about 200.000 miles now. Air Springs in Commercial Vehicles. After Hans J. Pahl left ContiTech Luftfedersysteme GmbH in 1999 he started to write down his knowledge on air springs and the first edition of his book about air springs was publisched in Germany in 2002. It is dedicated to automotive engineers, students of mechanical- and automotive engineering as well as to all those, who are professionally involved in vehicle technology and who want to learn more about air springs. The second edition of the book about air springs is now written in English to reach a larger number of readers. Some information is added and the chapter about legislation was deleted, because there are a lot of countries, where English is spoken, with different regulations concerning axle loads and gross vehicle weights. After reading this book one will certainly not be able to design and produce air springs, but it will make the communication between the automotive engineer and the air spring design engineer much easier, so that they will better understand each others work. The air spring design engineer will learn the basics of chassis design and driving dynamics. On the other hand, the automotive engineer will learn the basics of air spring design. The Yamaha XS650 Engine. In 2004, the author documented the disassembly of a XS 650 engine together with Reiner Althaus from Wuppertal by photographing all work steps. Later further detail photos were taken and the work steps of the reassembly was documented. Together with photos of a cutaway model which was used by Yamaha for training purposes, enough pictures were available to publish a description of the Yamaha XS 650 engine on the author’s private website. Most pictures can be downloaded from the authors website: http://www.hjpahl.com/xs650motor_galerie/galerie.html Chapter 9 “Electric System” is older and it was already available for download. For the sake of completeness, it was included into the book. Then in 2006 Udo Land proposed to create a professional book from the pdf-files, which the author published on his website. Both Udo Land as a graphic designer and Hans J. Pahl as an automotive engineer were familiar with the work on a book about technical matter. So the first edition in German language was quite a success. To make the book available for a larger number of readers, Hans J. Pahl started in 2016, when he was preparing for retirement, to work on an English version.