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Old 05-11-2019, 09:30 AM   #23
rotorwrench
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Location: San Antonio, Texas
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Default Re: how much assembly did Assembly Plants do?

They were buying the land and planning the layout in that time frame but they only had enough built by 1917 to manufacture the Ford & Son Tractors. He first had to buy out the share holders in order to get enough control to build the rest of the project which included getting the government to dredge the Rouge river so that the ships could come in and dock for iron, coal, & limestone they needed to work the two blast furnaces they were building. The Government took care of the dredging so they could get the Eagle boats that Ford was building into the water for the WWI contract on them.

The Dodge brothers brought the lawsuit against Ford Motors for suspending the dividends and asking for an injunction to stop the Rouge project. The courts were favorable to Ford on the injunction since WWI made the Rouge a necessity for the war effort. Due to all this, the Rouge project was only set up well enough to perform limited manufacturing until the lawsuit was settled by the Michigan State Supreme Court in February of 1919. This allowed Ford to present the share holders with the buyout after paying the back dividends to them. Ford was the largest share holder by then so he didn't have to pay himself. Ford told the shareholders that he was going to build cars under the Ford & Son name if they didn't want to sell their shares. The buy out was offered and agreed upon by all parties and the money was paid for $105M. Jim Couzens was the largest share holder so he got the lions share of $29.3M but he knew Henry well enough to get the best price. Not bad for an original investment of $2,500. The Dodge Brothers got $25M for their original $10K investment. Ford paid for it all by selling off overstock inventory of product and outdated equipment surplus to their needs. This quickly paid off a note he had arranged for $60M of the buy out amount.

The Rouge plant set up really started to get going in 1920 and by 1923 the blast furnaces were in full operation. It just kept building up as time and needs allowed after that. Design testing and tooling up for the model A took 9 months from model T shut down to start up of the A. Edsel and Henry only knocked heads on changes like the transmission and the brakes which isn't bad considering the way the father and son got along. They muddled through and got it into production. The next major change was tooling up for the V8 in 1931 & 32 and so it went on.

Ford had Keller machines to make the dies from the patterns made at the engineering labs. They also had some new presses that would do all but the largest of bodies. If you compare the Lincoln car designs to the model A designs, you can see some resemblance. Edsel Ford and his team were responsible for all the design work with final approval from Dad. Budd Co had the machines to be able to do the long van bodies and they were a subcontractor so Ford used them but the design patterns came from Ford and they always did when dealing with outside contractors. Budd told them what would work and what would not so they had final say about what they could press out in their shops.

Budd co was always a busy company so it didn't need Ford as much other contractors did. This site details what they did for Ford in the model A era as well as all the other multitude of manufacturers. http://www.coachbuilt.com/bui/b/budd/budd.htm

Last edited by rotorwrench; 05-11-2019 at 09:58 AM.
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