[rotorwrench]

Most of my info came from either Charlie Sorensen's book or the book "The Model A As Henry Built It". Budd Co was a contractor to Ford but the way I've always read it, they only built the truck cabs and various delivery bodies as complete bodies in the model A era. They may have made a lot of bare stampings for Ford but I haven't read anything other than the big van stuff and truck stuff as completed body units. When a company is cranking out cars from 35 different assembly plants with different tooling levels at more than a million vehicles a year then it takes a lot of materials and contractors to do all that. There is no doubt that Ford couldn't do it all in those years. I also don't know where all the stuff assembled in Canada was made. Some was coming from the US but I have no idea how much or from what companies.

Budd Co did a lot more work for Chrysler than they ever did for Ford but they were also doing it at plants in Europe as well and some of the European Ford companies were independent from Ford USA. Budd was also building the rail cars as well. Ford knew their capabilities came at a price so there may have been limitations about how much they let Budd do for them. Briggs and Murray were a lot more hungry than Budd and I don't know what all they made in house either. They may have subcontracted stuff as long as it didn't throw a wrench in there dealings with Ford Motors. They made their profit on quantity and they didn't pay as well as Ford did. Ford could keep them on a leash but Budd Co, not so much. Ford did a lot in house after they cranked up the Rouge or they never would have been able to offer the cars as low a price as they did. All the engines for US production and some foreign production were made at the rouge. They were shipped as engine & transmission assemblies by the rail car loads and so were frames and running gear. Contractors allowed Ford to keep up with manufacturing and sales of the model As or there would be a lot less of them around for certain.

If you look at Vince Falters site. Most of the information about Budd Co is listed as body panels developed by Budd and not body built by Budd as they do with Briggs and Murray. This was why I mentioned previously that Budd had to approve that they could make a panel in their presses. Since the presses were theirs, they were the only ones who could tell a manufacturer whether they could make a proper part for them. Pressing steel is tricky so when they had to do the work, they had to make sure that they could do it with minimal blemishes to the panels. There wasn't any company that had more experience in the business than they did. If the manufacturer's idea for a panel didn't work then further development had to be done to get it to work and I'm sure they were involved back and forth with the Ford Engineering Lab on that stuff. As far as the design, I'd be certain that it was kept to the Ford Motors basic design for each vehicle body they wanted to produce.