Life Inside a Ford Factory
Last week, Cars.com staffers toured Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant and saw how cars are assembled there. The factory opened in 1924, and its resume includes icons like the Model T, Fairlane 500 and LTD. Today it makes the new Taurus, as well as the Taurus X and Mercury Sable. Lincoln’s recently unveiled MKS is on its way, with a few prototypes already being worked on there. Donning reflective vests, plastic eyewear and tool belts — OK, no tool belts — we walked the assembly lines with quality manager John Siffer and about a dozen other supervisors and workers.
Once inside, the most striking thing was how distant the ceiling seemed. The sheer volume of steel framework above obscured any perception of a roof, at least anywhere nearby: Think of the overhead piping at a Costco warehouse, then multiply that by 10. At ground level, the high-pitched whine of mechanized tools intertwined with the clank of wheels falling and the pop, hiss and spark of welding robots. No matter what, the assembly line must keep moving, whether on ceiling-mounted rails or tracks dug into the floor. These tracks crossed our path in several spots, and we had to pause to let half-built cars mosey by. It was a lot like a cattle crossing.
Some areas were loud enough to require shouting, but in other places the noise fell to a mid-pitched rhythm. Temperatures were equally localized. In some areas it was quite warm — even with the temperature outside hovering near 30 degrees. How hot does it get in there on a 90-degree summer day? It’s pretty bad, Siffer deadpanned.
The plant employs more than 2,100 people and assembles close to 1,000 cars a day. With two shifts working eight hours each, a car leaves the assembly line every 58 seconds, plant manager Anthony Hoskins said. Most components come pre-assembled, leaving it up to workers and robots to put them all together. The cars take shape early on, and it’s easy enough to tell the difference in the framework between a Sable and a Taurus X. Jobs along the line run the gamut from snapping fenders on to installing entire engines. Whatever the task, a line worker has less than a minute to finish before the car is whisked to its next station.
What happens if a job runs amiss? Siffer pointed to a rope hanging beside each station that a worker can tug to stop the assembly line. It only stops the line in that area, he explained, so the guys mounting the wheels don’t have to pause because someone across the factory installed a radio upside-down. (I didn’t ask what happens if a worker stops the line too many times during a shift, but I presume you wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. Especially if you had installed a radio upside-down.)
Even the robots can detect errors and report them to the end of the line. We didn’t get up close to them; their mechanized arms spewed more sparks than a Michael Bay movie, and we were relegated to a color-coded visitor’s route at least 20 yards away. But it goes to show just how seamless a factory must be. With forklifts and workers crossing paths with large hunks of moving metal, the coordination that’s necessary there isn’t unlike that of a well-signaled city block.
Hoskins says it takes some 12 hours to assemble each car at the Chicago factory. Capping off the assembly is a routine dubbed the “Squeak/Rattle Test.” Stay tuned, and we’ll tell you more about that in our next post.
