Charles Salmans will speak on production of the B-24 bomber at Willow Run, MI. It is an inspiring story of American industrial might focused on defeating an existential foe.
Please watch the following film on YouTube. It was made by Ford Motor while the war was still on. I hadn’t realized that the site of this huge plant was a “model farm” that Henry Ford had created during the Depression to provide employment and teach farming skills to young men. So the first few minutes deal with that.
But then Ford was asked to build B-24 Bombers, which have 1.2 million parts compared to a few thousand that are in an automobile. Some 40,000 workers were hired to do the job, and at its peak the factory turned out a B-24 every 55 minutes.
What is striking when you see this footage is how labor intensive everything is. No robots. But they had to create all sorts of special jigs and tools to quickly manufacture the various parts. I was also thinking that, however motivated these workers were, there was a lot of room for slight variation as pieces were inserted into presses, drills were made, etc. The repetitive tasks must have been mind-numbing, also leading to error.