Rouge: Pictured in Its Prime

42. Soybean Operations

42 SOYBEAN OPERATIONS Farmers had always made up the majority of customers for Henry Ford’s automobiles and tractors. So when the Great Depression struck in 1929, Ford was searching for a crop that farmers could raise and sell to industry, providing money with which farmers could purchase automobiles and tractors. At Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Ford that year built a destructive distillation plant, where dozens of different agricultural crops were separated into their respective constituents to determine which crops contained industrially valuable ingredients. These experiments resulted in the choice of soybeans as the most promising crop. By developing a new and simple solvent extraction method of separating the soy oil from the bean, Ford found the resulting oil useful as a major constituent of a very superior auto enamel. The oil was also useful as an ingredient for automotive brake fluid and as a core binder in foundry operations. The residual soybean meal could be plasticized to provide an extensive variety of small automobile and tractor parts. Based on the methods developed at Greenfield Village, in late 1935, an industrial prototype soybean-processing plant was built as an addition to the Rouge glass plant. The chief product of the soybean used in Ford car manufacture at that time was the oil. For the one million cars built that year, 850,000 gallons were used for paint, 540,000 gallons for shock-absorber fluid, and 200,000 gallons for foundry core oil. The Rouge soybean-processing plant also produced a sizable number of small plastic automotive parts until 1939. Much of the soy oil extracted at the Rouge Plant was sent to Highland Park, where Ford paints were manufactured. During 1939, a much larger and more conspicuous Rouge soybeanprocessing plant was constructed facing Miller Road, south of the powerhouse . Ford, by this time, was proud of his industrial use of soybeans and wanted their use in automobiles and tractors to be well advertised. At this new location, soy oil continued to be extracted for paints, brake fluid, and core oil, and a much greater number and variety of plastic parts were manufactured. In 1940, Ford proudly demonstrated the application of soybean plastic as a material for automotive trunk lids and predicted that entire automotive bodies would soon be manufactured of such plastics. 257 258 Above: The wooden-framed building next to the Rouge glass plant housing the pilotsized industrial soybean oil extraction equipment and plastic molding equipment. The building was completed in 1936. (833.66250) Right: A pile of 60,000 bushels of soybeans stored at the west side of the glass plant on March 12, 1936. This represents the amount of soybeans grown on about 5,000 acres of Ford-owned land. (833.65421) Left: Crushed and flaked soybeans ready to be fed to the extractor for the removal of oil. With oil extracted, the remaining meal will become a constituent of soybean plastics. (833. 66420) Below: Tilted oil extraction tubes through which crushed soybeans are mixed with hexane which dissolves the oil from the beans, the hexane being driven off by evaporation to provide pure soybean oil. The photo is dated July 20, 1936. (833.66250) 261 An injection-molding machine that can produce small thermoplastic window hand-crank bezels by the dozen as fast as the worker can remove them from the machine. Pressure of 10 to 15 tons injects the granular materials into a cold mold for about thirty seconds. A battery of these machines produces 70,000 parts in eight hours. These are parts for the 1938 Ford. (833. 70088) Opposite, top: A man at a plastic molding machine that will form thirty-two automotive distributor contact cases in one operation. These thermo-setting soy materials are heated to 340 degrees Fahrenheit and subjected to 2500 pounds of pressure for about five minutes before being ejected. (833.68087-B) Opposite, bottom: A battery of twenty back-to-back molding machines, each capable of molding thirty-two distributor contact cases in a single operation. In addition to distributor parts, gearshift lever balls, horn buttons, coil case covers, and other small thermo-setting plastic parts are likewise molded of soybean plastic. The date is March 24, 1937. In the coming years, these machines will be producing plastic steering wheels and seats for Ford-Ferguson tractors. (833.71720-A) 262 Top: Henry Ford was...