Evening star., 1941-02-02
Thirteenth OF a SerieS.)
BY JOSEPH S. EDGERTON,
Star Staff Correspondent.

BY JOSEPH S. EDGERTON,
Star Staff Correspondent.
DETROIT, Mich, Feb. 1.-Trying
to forget that Henry Ford ever said
anything about 1000 airplanes
day, engineers of the Ford Motor
Co. today are facing the problems
of producing 1000 aircraft engines
enough for only four days of the
airplane program-but are under
taking at the same time. through
fundamental research, TO break the
four bottlenecks which today choke
mass production of aircraft and
engines.
These bottlenecks broken, there
might be some hope of attaining
eventually some such goal as that
outlined by Mr.. Ford. But that, 1t
Is admitted, is matter so far in
the future as still to be visionary.
The bottlenecks are: /, personnel;
2, machinery and tools; 3, raw ma
terials, and 4, time.
Would Avoid Fantastic Expansion"
Only by breaking all four stimuli
taneouSly can true mass production
OF aircraft be attained. 1t is the aim
of the research program which has
been instituted by Ford Production
Manager Charles E. SorenSen, who
has succeeded Defense Commission
er KnudSen in that capacity, to
make possible mass production of
arplanes and engines without fan
taStlc expansion" of personnel or
plant. 1t is felt that there are better
and less costly ways of doing the
job than those now in use. and
the Ford people are trying to dis
cover these methods.
AS an example, Ford engineers
have taken the airplane engine
cylinder. In present practice. the
cylinder starts as 75-pound chunk
OF forged steel, arrived at by cutting
the ends off an even larger, heavier
lngot. This 75-pound mass is cut
down eventually TO about Is pounds
by turning, milling, boring and
grinding operations.
Ford engineers have developed,
for automobile construction, a CEN
trifugal casting method which
makes use Of recent developments in
the metallurgical science They are
studying a method of casting air.
plane engine cylinders which gives
them, as the starting point, a rough
casting which now weighs about IS
pounds and which soon will be re-
duced to so pounds. Instead of
machining away about SO pounds of
tough, hard metal, they have to
cut away l9 pounds or less. The
saving in time, tools and man power
is even greater than the figures
would indicate. Ford engineers say.
This, they consider is one means of
simultaneously breaking all four
bottlenecks.
Spinning Mold" Method Used.
The spinning mold" method has
been used for some time at the Ford
plant for such operations as casting
gear blanks, which require tough
ness and strength not ordinarily as
sociated in the lay mind with cast
ings. It is claimed that the burst
ing strength of cylinder produced
by the forging method is from $500
to 5000 pounds but that centrifugal
castings have been made which have
a bursting strength of 5000 to $500
pounds.
The forging method required, for
a single stage of its operation, one
press which cost s105000 and took
five months to build. Dies for the
centrifugal casting cost $4,000 and
can be made in the Ford plant.
The crankshaft forging for an
airplane engine. in one specific case,
starts as a chunk of steel weighing
more than 1000 pounds and ends
as a beautifully machined article
weighing a little more than tenth
the starting weight. In the process
of machining it must frequently be
removed from the machines and
subjected to heat treating to re-
move strains in the metal set up
by the cutting. Ford engineers are
studying a casting method which
starts with a blank very close to
final dimensions and entails little
more than a polishing job.
The Ford specialists also are look
ing into the possibility of devising
a method of welding instead of
riveting of duralumin for construc-
ton of airplanes wings and fuse
lagos. Critics of the 1000 airplanes
a day program computed that, on
the basis of present practice, with
the number of rivets per airplane
known quantity and the number of
rivets a man could handle in an
hour also a fixed factor, it would
require $4,000 men to do the rivet-
ing alone on 1000 airplanes a day.
Fifty thousand riveters alone would
require a good sized community to
house them and a factory which,
as even Ford experts admit, would