Waste not, want not
Evan Zabawski | TLT From the Editor September 2018
Disassembling a story to find the truth.
It is well known that many myths and legends have some basis in truth and reality.
Photo courtesy of the collections of The Henry Ford, cited on page 10 of www.dalnet.lib.mi.us/henryford/docs/EdselBFordOfficePapers_Accession6.pdf.
Henry Ford once had a goal for a “continuous, nonstop process from raw material to finished product with no pause even for warehousing or storage.” He nearly achieved it, too, at his Rouge River Complex in Dearborn, Mich.
Recently a second-generation, former Ford employee was regaling me with stories about the various methods employed at the site. One involved Ford’s purchase of iron mines and limestone quarries to aid in the production of the company’s own steel, another the onsite manufacturing of their own tires using rubber from a facility operated in Brazil, and yet another of the glass plant (rolling up to 13.4 miles of glass each day during the second World War).
One story that highlighted the extent of how every product that was shipped to The Rouge was used to its entirety involved nuts and bolts. The employee said Ford dictated the dimensions of the wooden packing boxes used for outsourced parts such that the wood could be reused as floor boards in the cars being built. This inspired me to research the story further to see if I could come up with a column about waste reduction.
An initial Internet search turned up many versions of the story with varying levels of detail; some said it was simply the overall dimensions and wood type while others said even the screw hole placement was a factor. One particularly detailed version of the story involved Ford being on hand for the first delivery of parts in boxes under his guidelines and demonstrating his rationale by personally unscrewing a box and showing a doubting group of executives how the piece fit directly onto a chassis.
It hardly seems reasonable for someone like Henry Ford to be so secretive with his own staff, never mind interfere with production using such a demonstration. Some forum posts discounted the story by including pictures of floor boards with manufacturer stamps, or tongue and groove usage on select sides only.
One article included a copy of a contemporary reply from then-president Edsel Ford’s office to a query from the New York Tribune regarding the story. Though the letter states “there is no truth whatever in the story,” it is well known that many myths and legends have some basis in truth and reality, therefore I set off in search of that kernel of truth.
The connection seemed to appear in Tom McCarthy’s book Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment, specifically the chapter titled The Death and Afterlife of Automobiles. The chapter details how the 1920s saw the first wave of mass-produced vehicles reaching the end of their useful life. One person trying to profit from these events was Morris Roseman, a Russian immigrant working in Lancaster, Pa.
Roseman was a rag-and-bone man who lost money trying to flip some used cars, but he realized there was money in the still serviceable parts, therefore he opened what may have been the earliest version of a pick and pull lot. After all the good parts were sold off from his cars, the remaining hulk was scrapped and sent to blast furnaces like those at The Rouge—every ton of which conserved four tons of iron ore, coal and limestone that otherwise would have been needed to produce steel.
Ford committed to integrating this level of recycling at The Rouge by opening a disassembly line on Feb. 5, 1930. First the oil, gasoline and grease were drained, saved and recycled, then the cars were stripped of “tires, batteries, headlight lenses and bulbs, spark plugs, floorboards, glass, leather cloth, upholstery stuffing, radiators, and nonferrous metal parts.” A salvage sales department would recondition and sell serviceable parts, whereas unusable tires and glass were recycled. Leather could be “reclaimed for aprons, upholstery for hand pads and floorboards for crate tops.”
So the story that Ford was reusing as much material as possible at The Rouge is true (at least until World War II when the project was abandoned), only the order of reuse has become lost in the retelling.
Evan Zabawski, CLS, is the senior technical advisor for TestOil in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. You can reach him at ezabawski@testoil.com.