Carpenter See Also: Crown By Carpenter In May 1991, Carpenter Body Works of Mitchell, Indiana purchased the tooling, intellectual, and product rights of Crown Coach Corporation, a California-based school bus manufacturer that had closed that year. While Carpenter had originally planned to restart production of the Crown Supercoach Series II, its high cost and complexity of production would cause that proposal to be shelved in favor of its own design. In 1995, Carpenter began a series of major changes within the company in order to regain lost market share. To modernize its production facilities, Carpenter moved out of its aging facilities in Mitchell, Indiana and leased the shuttered Wayne facilities in Richmond, moving its corporate headquarters there. By moving to the Wayne facilities, Carpenter had the asset of combining its own team with former Wayne Corporation employees. Both the leadership and workforce based at Richmond included a number of veterans of the former Wayne operations there; as such, they brought considerable experience and knowledge of the plant and industry to the effort. Nevertheless, major outside forces still to be faced were a supply of suitable chassis and the overcapacity of the body industry As part of the move, Carpenter unveiled major changes for its 1996 product line. On the outside, the body now wore full-length guard rails above the wheels. Under the skin, the body was redesigned with single-piece roof bows; new welding procedures allowed by the equipment at Richmond strengthened roof joints (unlike a crucial structural flaw later found in Mitchell-produced buses). Inside the bus, Wayne tooling was used to update certain areas of the Carpenter buses; on conventional buses, Carpenter re-used the driver control panel and windshield from the Wayne Lifeguard; all full-size buses would use Wayne entry doors. The company considered the transformation so extensive that it changed its name and company logo. Resurrecting the first half of the Crown Coach name, Carpenter was now known as Crown By Carpenter and used its own version of a logo introduced by Crown Coach in the late 1980s. In an effort to further diversify its product line outside of school buses, the company introduced a delivery truck loosely based on its Cadet bus products. In 1998, Carpenter was acquired by one of its largest chassis suppliers, Spartan Motors of Charlotte, Michigan. Spartan Motors was a chassis supplier known for high-margin, low-volume markets; some examples include chassis for fire apparatus