Rouge: Pictured in Its Prime

5. Foundry

5 FOUNDRY The foundry at the Rouge, the largest, cleanest, and coolest production foundry in the world, could pour 2900 tons of automotive and tractor castings every twenty-four hours. Molten iron from the blast furnaces, arriving in 75ton ladle cars, was poured into a 1200-ton mixer furnace from which it was fed together with scrap metal, coke, and limestone to make up the charge for each of twenty-eight cupola furnaces. The Ford production foundry was uniquely designed to allow molds to be moved by conveyor to the furnace spout, rather than the molten metal being taken from the furnaces to the molds in small ladles. The cupola furnaces were on the west side of the foundry close to the blast furnaces. The east side of the foundry building was devoted to rough machining of the multitude of engine castings before they were sent on a long overhead conveyor to the motor building for finish machining and assembly. In the foundry’s large mold and core rooms, hundreds of women were employed to assemble the damp sand molds and cores as they moved by on a bench-high conveyor. Complex castings such as cylinder blocks, cylinder heads, intake and exhaust manifolds, flywheels, and housings, as well as other automotive parts, were cast in iron by the thousands every day. In the process of shaking each casting from its mold, the mold and cores were destroyed.The very first Rouge castings were poured on December 25, 1920. By November 1922, four-cylinder engine blocks for the Model T were being cast. In 1931, a single V-8 engine block required twenty-five 14-quart pails of sand, 6.5 quarts of mixed oils, and 9 quarts of flour, all in a uniform mixture to fashion a single V-8 motor block mold. Accurately placed within the mold were fortysix small cores of various shapes. For its day, the intricate Ford V-8 singlepiece casting was a benchmark in foundry practice. 49 50 Above: The west side (furnace side) of the production foundry as seen looking southeast on a sunny afternoon. In the shadows on the far right are the blast furnaces. (833.68808-H) Right: Detail sketch of a foundry cupola furnace, copied from a Henry Ford Trade School metallurgy textbook. 51 Above: A pair of 1200-ton mixers on rollers so that they can be turned on their sides to pour their contents of molten iron into ladles from which castings are poured. (833.56403) Left: Pouring molten iron into V-8 engine molds as the molds move along on a conveyor, each mold held by a long vertical arm. (833.59575) Right: The engine block “shake-out” area, where the solidified but still hot iron block is shaken out of the mold. In the process, the mold is destroyed. The open grill floor allows the loose sand to be recovered below for further use. (833.62801-A) Below: The upside-down engine block after being shaken from the mold and cleaned. The metal surface has a sandy texture because the mold was composed of sand. Considerable rough machining is necessary to remove excess metal, including the tall “risers” needed to fill the mold completely during the pouring. (833.628850) Left: In the foundry machine shop, mammoth rotary milling machines are used to remove the rough top surface of the V-8 cylinder blocks. (833.57787) Below: A multiple-spindle drill press machining a V-8 cylinder block in the foundry machine shop. Stud holes for the cylinder head and valve chamber cover holes are all drilled into the block at the same time. The milky fluid sprayed onto the spots being drilled is a specially formulated “cutting fluid.” After machining in the foundry, the engine castings are moved by conveyor to the motor building for finish machining. (833.11060) ...