Fords 100 years of the massive Rouge River Plant.. (Michigan)

[ozpont]

http://www.autoweek.com/article/20131009/CARNEWS/131009790

   Having been through this massive plant facility a few times in the last 35 years - its shows what people with vision..and the money.. and the co-operation of like minded people can build...from iron ore to driver... . They do regular plant tours... and  you really  should.. Put this plant tour.. on your bucket list......



Methods and machines change. The earth, and men, endure'

Graham Kozak 11:23 am, October 11, 2013

Henry Ford may not have invented the concept of the moving assembly line, but his triumph -- adapting it to automobile production -- made affordable personal transportation possible.

This film reel doesn't take us to Ford's Highland Park plant, where the Model T assembly line fired up a century ago this week. Instead, it brings us to the River Rouge facility, which began building Model As in 1927 and produces the F150 today.

The film starts by hitting us with statistics about the complex that are impressive even by modern standards: 1096 acres! 7,250,000 square feet of floor space! 345 acres of glass windows! 90 miles of railroad track! More than 80,000 men normally employed! We can only imagine how jaw-dropping these numbers must have seemed over seven decades ago.

The River Rouge plant was vertical integration at its most extreme, with raw materials being transformed into cars within days of arriving at the facility. Cutting-edge machines enabled the process, but the film makes it clear that, without the tens of thousands of skilled men filling the plant's halls and working those machines, it's all as good as useless.

By the time a car carrier laden with brand-new 1938 Ford V8s departs for dealerships unknown, you've been taken through the whole assembly process, start to finish -- from the electric cranes unloading ore from freighters to smelters to parts fabrication and final assembly.

Today's automobile factories, including the retrofitted River Rouge plant, are far more economical -- outsourcing parts production and using a fraction of the human labor to produce cars much more complicated than the '38 models seen in this film. But when it comes to showing what, exactly, goes into a car in terms of resources and manpower, this vintage footage can't be beat.