Just watched it all the way through. Labor intensive! Not many jobs in that factory I'd want to do all day long. How about the guys hefting cylinder blocks by hand into the honing machines? Or grinding frame horns.. Great video, thanks for posting it up!
Check out the guy with the white shirt and bow tie installing the top with a magnetic hammer and taking the roof tacks out of his mouth! He looks like a waiter in some restaurant.
And those guys were knocking down a dollar per hour if they were at the top of their game, that was good money for the times. Thank you for posting, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire video. HRP
Neat video. Can definitely see the aviation influence in the engine design. Kind of strange seeing the piston and rod ***emblies loaded in from the bottom. Lots of use of go/no-go gauges during the manufacturing process.
Just think, that was state of the art machining 96 years ago. Most likely none of those workers are alive but, we still can enjoy the fruits of their labor. YES. THEY SURE DID LABOR. That was hard, back braking work.
The tooling/manufacturing engineers sure were the labor/time saving masterminds of the day! All the fixturing and process shots are great!!
And none of it was done with great precision either. Just clamp the wood and cut the wood, over and over again.
The thing that really surprised me was that the cam was cut entirely from a piece of round bar stock rather than being cast as a blank and machined/ground to final shape/size. A billet cam costs perhaps 5X as much as one made from a cast blank today, and that's with the speed of CNC to do all the machining. Back then, when they were roughing out the lobes on a horizontal mill, the final piece cost probably more on the order of 15X the cost of a cast blank cam. Strange thing which, sorta like polishing the frame rails, added nothing to the value of the car, but significantly added to the cost.
Also looked like they spent some time smoothing out the as-cast finish of the crankcase and cylinder castings. And I'd bet that the salesman always pointed out these smoothed surfaces to every prospective buyer.
This was an odd scene, the man is using a small squeeze bulb to raise a ball bearing(?) which is then bounced on a cam lobe. Hardness testing?
Fabulous. My neighbor's '22 Lincoln touring car has an aluminum body. Does anyone know if the sedans were aluminum too? Did you see at 19 to 20 minutes the crankshaft is flat plane? I thought that was a new concept. Thanks for posting. The Dodge Brothers club has a factory film similar to this. Done in 1917ish the photography is not as good. I think it can be viewed on AACA library website in their Youtube section. It tells how many tons of br***, horsehair, leather, etc. are used every day. Just keeping up the supply chain would have been monumental.
THANK YOU! Finally got to see a lot of ***embly line features I've always wondered about. Welded wire wheel ***embly, wood body ***embly, and body masking & paint. Hand held body beading was something I never knew existed. I'll watch it a few more times I'm sure.
Wow. Thank you for sharing that. That was amazing! I don't do ford, but have owned 7 Lincoln Continentals.
The wheel making was surprisingly time consuming, but what really impressed me was the fully machined combustion chambers.
The Jalopy Journal
