Visit the Ford River Rouge Plant
 

Too amazing not to share. It's about 30 min long, but had me fixated. Lykins, Craft and many others will appreciate how they turned out the engines.;)

Vintage footage of the Ford River Rouge assembly plant - Autoweek

I was a GM Manufacturing Engineer at both assembly and component plants and then Advanced Manufacturing Engineer on the Ford PowerStroke.

It is fascinating to see how much goes into building a good product. If anyone gets a chance to tour any auto plants - take it. Then remember you are only seeing a small piece of what goes on.

John

I was in both Engine Plant 1 and 2 in Cleveland when EP1 was still running. They built the 3.0 liter in that facility for Ford and Jag. Ford used to manufacture almost all of the parts including the cam, rods, and pistons. In the new EP2, they build the eco engines. Now the cam, rods, etc are all done by outside sources. The blocks, cranks, and heads are about all they machine in-house now besides assembly.

People in Ohio (politicians) like to point out how many manufacturing jobs were lost, but in reality, they weren't lost due to the economy. They were lost due to advancements in technology. In the old EP1, a crank was dropped every 30 seconds on the transfer line. When any part of the line went down, the whole line went down and people scrambled to get it up and running. They had about 15 people per line running everything. In EP2, the transfer line is random, so if a machine goes down, the line continues to run skipping that particular machine until it is fixed. They now drop a crank every 5 seconds and they have 2 guys running 2 transfer lines.

The real technological marvel of a factory is the GM transmission facility in Toledo Ohio. They have 2 guys that work there that have PHd's in metallurgy. The leaps in manufacturing at that facility that is ongoing is mind boggling.