It’s well known how (virtually) every manufacturing plant started cranking out planes, tanks, ships, and jeeps almost overnight…but how could they retool so fast? And, why do we seem so hindered today? For example, the Chysler Durango plant by me couldn’t do squat to save their necks when Amerca’s love for large SUVs turned cold. What’s the difference? BTW, now the plant has been torn down. (Is that what America has come to?)
Money (cost) was not the primary concern during the war, but it is now.
From what I understand (please correct me if I’m wrong) is they didn’t worry about any free-market stuff. Roosevelt said, “Ford, you’re making tank parts.” And so they did.
Stuff was also easier to make back then. Look at pictures of a P-38 line, and you aren’t going to see a lot of exotic tooling, like specialized jigs or whatnot. Things were made with a LOT of touch labor, not automated processes.
Compare that to modern production of weapons, which uses lots of exotic materials, lots of specialty tooling to do crazy things with metal, all sorts of processes to cut down on costly touch labor, and so on. It’s hard and expensive to tool up for modern production compared to how it used to be.
Not sure if you have heard of this, but there’s a really interesting phenomenon in manufacturing: as the number of something produced doubles, the efficiency of producing that thing grows at a pretty predictable rate. So, on something that involves a lot of touch labor, like a WW2 tank or something, the 2nd one produced may be made 18% (or something like that) more efficiently than the first; the 4th will be 18% more efficient than the 2nd; and so on, so the 128th produced will be 18% more efficiently made than the 64th. It’s called the learning curve, or experience curve. I always marveled at how that happens.
Tools back then were not the highly specialized end products of a chain of engineering they are now. Automated and semi-automated assembly lines take longer to re-tool than ones based on human operation. Re-programming a robot to weld five spots in an arc over a wheel instead of three spots on a frame is very time-consuming. It takes about five minutes to explain to a human welder.
Enjoy,
Steven
What did you expect them to re-tool to make? More non-SUV cars that were already being over-produced elsewhere? Or perhaps a new sedan that they had all of the plans for (including production plans) and were just too jackholish to release in order to keep their plant open?
I don’t see how re-tooling during war time and closing a plant due to lack of sales have anything to do with each other.
In WWII (as was pointed out) tanks and fighter planes were pretty simple machines (compared with today). Plus, auto and truck assembly lines could be modified to make tanks and military vehicles, fairly easily. Plus, the US defense industry could call of British expertise-for example, the excellent Rolls Royce “Merlin” aircraft engine was produced by Packard in the USA. It powered Allied fighter planes, and was one of the bast engines of WWII.
Do a little research on Liberty Ships. They are the best known symbols of the dramatic change and the men who served on them never had a good word to say about them. So, in short, they didn’t waste a lot of time and money on design or quality control.