Shoutout to the Henry Ford Museum located in Dearborn, Michigan which is a treasure trove of 19th and early 20th century technology. A true celebration of, what I would consider, the most physically transformative era in human history thus far.
Ford could afford to purchase dedicated steel-stamping presses to churn out pressed-steel crankcases, which were cheaper and used less material than the cast iron employed by other manufacturers
Eventually it was even cheaper to not have a separate crankcase and just cast it with the rest of the engine block, as is now common practice (and has been for around a century).
This is basically the 1910s version of 'move fast and break things.' Tossing out a one-month-old machine for a better one is such a Silicon Valley mindset.
> some types of manufacturing were done without even the aid of dimensioned drawings
A friend of mine ordered a set of dimensioned drawings for the P-51 Mustang. He was investigating the possibility of going into business making P-51s.
But when talking to people who owned P-51s, he was told that the drawings were made after-the-fact. The true design was encapsulated in the jigs and machinery developed for the factory floor, and they'd all been scrapped after the war.
The drawings were useless.
I'm pretty sure that P-51s are maintained these days by making replacement parts by hand and custom-fitted, a very expensive proposition.
As long as parts were mechanically produced in series, they are standard. It doesn’t really matter then if the drawings were made ex post from existing parts. If you produce from a description with a precision equivalent to the original machinery tolerance, you should end up with virtually identical parts.
> I'm pretty sure that P-51s are maintained these days by making replacement parts by hand
This is fairly common for old cars too when spare parts are not mass produced anymore if they were at all. It used to be really common for all repairs not that long ago to be honest.
My grandfather was a mechanics in the 50s and he liked to explain that machining parts was a common occurrence then because getting parts shipped would take considerably longer than just making them and everyone involved knew how to machine parts anyway.
Will the book cover how Ford nearly lost it all in his efforts of improving the manufacturing process and lowering the costs of the Model T? In the end people had enough of the car and wanted something new, but all Ford could produce - arguably really well - was the Model T. The competitors focused their manufacturing process such that they could efficiently reuse components for a handful of years, then they made small changes to make their new models "feel new and exciting", as we see today, which gave them the upper hand when people got fed up of the Model T.
I'm waiting for history to repeat itself with Tesla, but it's not a popular (hi)story to tell. Not as popular as how great an American pioneer Henry Ford was, for sure.
At least the OP excerpt focuses only on Ford’s efficiency engine: precision machining, interchangeable parts, and the moving assembly line combined with extreme production volumes to make the Model T nearly impossible to compete with on cost and reliability. But there’s a deeper lesson than just “Ford was rigid, GM was flexible.”
The real dynamic was that efficiency and scale compound improvements but also compound lock-in. The more Ford optimized his system around one product, the higher the switching cost to change anything fundamental. Every special-purpose machine tool, every supplier contract, every material flow was tuned to one car. At small scale, that’s agility. At massive scale, it’s a straitjacket.
Tesla faces a version of this trap. Its efficiency engine is vertical integration and battery/powertrain mastery. But the stronger that engine gets, the more risk that its identity collapses into “this is what we make, as efficiently as possible,” rather than “this is what the market wants, however we must adapt.” GM in the 1920s wasn’t just adding variety for fun, it was creating a systematic upgrade ladder (“a car for every purse and purpose” as Sloan said at the time) that turned consumer churn into a growth engine (allowing customers to start with basic models like Chevrolet and progressively upgrade to more luxurious brands such as Oldsmobile, Buick, or Cadillac). I agree that Tesla hasn’t yet built an equivalent mechanism to capture customers once they’ve “had enough of the Model T.”
The irony is that efficiency-driven firms almost never stumble because they stop improving; they stumble because all their improvements are local optimizations. Ford’s engineers in 1925 were still making operations faster, parts cheaper, and tolerances tighter, but all within the cage of the Model T. Tesla today is in danger of repeating this exact logic trap: world-class at batteries and drivetrains, but perhaps blind to the fact that consumer perception, design novelty, and product line evolution can erode even the strongest cost advantage.
>This meant Ford could purchase parts and materials in large quantities at better prices and schedule regular deliveries, ensuring a steady, reliable delivery of material, which allowed it to maintain just a 10-day supply of parts on hand.
And I thought it was Toyota which pioneered the 'just in time' method.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 37.3 ms ] threadEventually it was even cheaper to not have a separate crankcase and just cast it with the rest of the engine block, as is now common practice (and has been for around a century).
A friend of mine ordered a set of dimensioned drawings for the P-51 Mustang. He was investigating the possibility of going into business making P-51s.
But when talking to people who owned P-51s, he was told that the drawings were made after-the-fact. The true design was encapsulated in the jigs and machinery developed for the factory floor, and they'd all been scrapped after the war.
The drawings were useless.
I'm pretty sure that P-51s are maintained these days by making replacement parts by hand and custom-fitted, a very expensive proposition.
As long as parts were mechanically produced in series, they are standard. It doesn’t really matter then if the drawings were made ex post from existing parts. If you produce from a description with a precision equivalent to the original machinery tolerance, you should end up with virtually identical parts.
> I'm pretty sure that P-51s are maintained these days by making replacement parts by hand
This is fairly common for old cars too when spare parts are not mass produced anymore if they were at all. It used to be really common for all repairs not that long ago to be honest.
My grandfather was a mechanics in the 50s and he liked to explain that machining parts was a common occurrence then because getting parts shipped would take considerably longer than just making them and everyone involved knew how to machine parts anyway.
I'm waiting for history to repeat itself with Tesla, but it's not a popular (hi)story to tell. Not as popular as how great an American pioneer Henry Ford was, for sure.
The real dynamic was that efficiency and scale compound improvements but also compound lock-in. The more Ford optimized his system around one product, the higher the switching cost to change anything fundamental. Every special-purpose machine tool, every supplier contract, every material flow was tuned to one car. At small scale, that’s agility. At massive scale, it’s a straitjacket.
Tesla faces a version of this trap. Its efficiency engine is vertical integration and battery/powertrain mastery. But the stronger that engine gets, the more risk that its identity collapses into “this is what we make, as efficiently as possible,” rather than “this is what the market wants, however we must adapt.” GM in the 1920s wasn’t just adding variety for fun, it was creating a systematic upgrade ladder (“a car for every purse and purpose” as Sloan said at the time) that turned consumer churn into a growth engine (allowing customers to start with basic models like Chevrolet and progressively upgrade to more luxurious brands such as Oldsmobile, Buick, or Cadillac). I agree that Tesla hasn’t yet built an equivalent mechanism to capture customers once they’ve “had enough of the Model T.”
The irony is that efficiency-driven firms almost never stumble because they stop improving; they stumble because all their improvements are local optimizations. Ford’s engineers in 1925 were still making operations faster, parts cheaper, and tolerances tighter, but all within the cage of the Model T. Tesla today is in danger of repeating this exact logic trap: world-class at batteries and drivetrains, but perhaps blind to the fact that consumer perception, design novelty, and product line evolution can erode even the strongest cost advantage.
And I thought it was Toyota which pioneered the 'just in time' method.