There’s no doubt that you’ll instantly recognize clips from the video below, as they’ve been used over and over for more than 100 years to illustrate the development of the assembly line. But those brief clips never told the whole story about just how much effort Ford was forced to put into manufacturing just one component of their iconic Model T: the wheels.
An in-house production of Ford Motors, this film isn’t dated, at least not obviously. And with the production of Model T cars using wooden spoked artillery-style wheels stretching from 1908 to 1925, it’s not easy to guess when the film was made. But judging by the clothing styles of the many hundreds of men and boys working in the River Rouge wheel shop, we’d venture a guess at 1920 or so.
Production of the wooden wheels began with turning club-shaped spokes from wooden blanks — ash, at a guess — and drying them in a kiln for more than three weeks. While they’re cooking, a different line steam-bends hickory into two semicircular felloes that will form the wheel’s rim. The number of different steps needed to shape the fourteen pieces of wood needed for each wheel is astonishing. Aside from the initial shaping, the spokes need to be mitered on the hub end to fit snugly together and have a tenon machined on the rim end. The felloes undergo multiple steps of drilling, trimming, and chamfering before they’re ready to receive the spokes.
The first steel component is a tire, which rolls down out of a furnace that heats and expands it before the wooden wheel is pressed into it. More holes are drilled and more steel is added; plates to reinforce the hub, nuts and bolts to hold everything together, and brake drums for the rear wheels. The hubs also had bearing races built right into them, which were filled with steel balls right on the line. How these unsealed bearings were protected during later sanding and grinding operations, not to mention the final painting step, which required a bath in asphalt paint and spinning the wheel to fling off the excess, is a mystery.
Welded steel spoked wheels replaced their wooden counterparts in the last two model years for the T, even though other car manufacturers had already started using more easily mass-produced stamped steel disc wheels in the mid-1920s. Given the massive infrastructure that the world’s largest car manufacturer at the time devoted to spoked wheel production, it’s easy to see why. But Ford eventually saw the light and moved away from spoked wheels for most cars. We can’t help but wonder what became of the army of workers, but it probably wasn’t good. So turn the wheels of progress.
If you enjoy and want to learn more how wheels are made i highly recommend EngelsCoachShop on youtube. He has made pretty much every type of wheel out there from small stuff to borax wagon wheels to not long ago doing a set of 12 foot logging wheels. Great channel worth checking out.
What a coincidence, since i have bought a very nice Michelin wheel (or rim to be exact, since the rubber tire is missing) made of wood and steel very like these ones, probably circa 1920. Very interesting and enjoyable to watch.
But what the heck: Youtube quality up to 4K when original video quality is obviously at best 480! Is this a way to attract more views by promoting fake video quality? If not a scam, it is at least a complete waste of storage space and network bandwidth!
Good point! In this day of 40 megabyte hard drives and 2400 baud modems, how will anyone ever cope with this horrendously wasteful use of storage and network bandwidth?!
It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that somebody is going to be made to pay for it, and shit flows downhill.
And for what it’s worth, it’s very common that if you’re using cellular data, that makes video load in 480p unless you specifically take steps to get your way.
The “original” video was on film which has no sense of 4k vs 480P. When doing a film-to-digitial transfer, you would want to capture it at the highest resolution possible, and only downsample later when needed. Even for degraded film like this, doing the initial capture at high rez maintains data that might be useful in the future to restore the image.
Unless you’re saying the film-to-digital capture was done at 480P and then upsampled later, which is less useful. Although even then, there are good deep learning algorithms that can upscale a video better than your browser does at playback time.
You have to “Oversample” youtube uploads to preserve quality. YouTube will compress the heck out of a high quality 480p source file, if you first export at 1080p or larger and upload it YouTube won’t squish out as much detail.
No pesky safety guards on any of those machines. No uncomfortable eye protection. Gosh, some of them actually wore gloves (when handling hot wheel components).
My father told me that some of the suspensions wire for the Ambassador bridge did not meet their specifications and Henry Ford bought the batch. He used the material on his welded wire wheels.
In regards to the wood felloe wheels shown in the article, we are fortunate in the Model T hobby to have an Amish wheelwright who can make any wooden wheel for our cars. It’s nice to know that the skill exists over a century later.
I was going to mention Amish Wheelwrights, kudos to you!
Somewhere in all of this, another product evolved: The charcoal briquet. There was so much sawdust/waste produced in the production of these and wooden parts of the car bodies that – in the “waste nothing” mode of the era – after everything could be extracted from the wood the remaining carbon was sold as fuel.
https://www.ironmountaindailynews.com/news/local-news/2017/12/kingsford-fuel-the-burning-history-of-charcoal-briquettes/
Never use briquets.
Natural charcoal is readily available.
Mesquite tastes better than burnt glue.
Also better than propane…Cue Hank Hill.
At least briquets have a use. Better than particle board.
You don’t get rich by throwing resources away.
My family had a model T truck for 90 or so years up until a couple months ago, but I must admit I never thought about it other than playing in it once or twice as a kid. Because these things are so cheap and utilitarian, it’s easy to miss that they were in part handmade craft items.
Sometimes new products are poignant in the same way, like when you take apart a disposable appliance motor or garment, and have a sudden flash of how someone made this by hand.
1:30 is an ohsa violation waiting to happen…
Maybe OSHA is lobbying for suspension of the Ststute of Limitations?
B^)
“We can’t help but wonder what became of the army of workers, but it probably wasn’t good.”
Yes, and today’s EVs only need a fraction of the autoworkers that were needed for ICE cars. Same for aftermarket garages muffler brake shops etc
And the batteries are not fixable – just replace.
And don’t even think about how AI has already displaced telephone customer care.
”
And don’t even think about how AI has already displaced telephone customer care.”
Ugh!
Batteries are not fixable… but battery packs are. There is already at least specialty shop I’m aware of that does this, and there will be more as the market for them grows.
Thank god for OSHA, the labor movement, and SolidWorks!