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The New Plant Comes To Life
The Dallas plant was a hodge-podge of small industries when Chance Vought began its move. Printers, infant’s wear manufacturers, stove makers, soap dealers, sheet metal fabricators, a clothes-pin manufacturer, a tire distributor and a fragment of Montgomery Ward were all housed in the plant. Popcorn and coffee machines were being manufactured in the area. Even the parking lot, where a cement pipe maker held forth, was occupied. Each small industry had arranged its space to suit its activities. For one aircraft manufacturer to follow another into a plant and to rehabilitate it to suit its own peculiar operations would have been hard enough. For an aircraft manufacturer to come in on the heels of such a disparate group was a still more gigantic task.
The job facing W. H. Espey, Chance Vought’s facilities manager, in getting the new property ready for Chance Vought’s occupancy, fell into three phases: getting the existing tenants to vacate the plant, preparing the plant and offices for Chance Vought to move in, and arranging for new construction. Naturally, until a final decision had been made, no steps could be taken to vacate the plant. Chance Vought, then, moved in on the 19th of April under the same roof with 30 other tenants. Gradually, their leases were terminated. But for sometime, Chance Vought was working elbow-to-elbow with the old tenants. Its first freight cars arrived at a crowded loading dock, still occupied by a surplus aircraft parts dealer. The plant was not only full of tenants but equipment, much of which was government surplus. Bill Conklin, an industrial engineer, working with Earl Martin, whom Espey had sent to take charge of facilities, arranged an inventory of surplus material stored at the plant, and tagged all items that Chance Vought might need. He sent a list of machines and furniture that he had tagged to Stratford, so all departments could look it over and see if the material could be used in their operations. Any material accepted was included in layouts and taken over by Chance Vought.
As tenants gradually moved out, maintenance orders were issued as to placement of partitions, where to patch floors, ceilings and walls, and where to paint. Temporary office space was offered as it became available, and a training area was cleared. As the Stratford plant began to ship out machines, they would notify Conklin and Dick Rice, another industrial engineer now in Dallas. They would mark the exact locations of the machines on the floor with chalk or paint. As they spotted the machines on the factory floor, they would make out work cards showing inventory numbers of the machines. This card went to the maintenance people moving in equipment just as soon as word was received that a machine was arriving on a freight car. The machine was taken off the freight car immediately, cleaned of the preservative material that the Stratford plant had put on it, moved to its exact location on the factory floor, and bolted and connected for electricity. The work of re-erecting the machines was a complex task, an infinitely harder one than the dismantling in Stratford had been. A person can easily take a watch apart, but he may not be able to fit the parts together so that the watch will run. The dismantling and re-assembly of the machines stood in about that relation. So that no experience or knowledge of the machines would be lost, Espey devised a system of rotating his key men who worked on the dismantling operations so that some of them would be in Dallas for the re-assembly. The activity of installing equipment became a contest. It began when the Stratford maintenance crew took down the giant Erie Press in six weeks. Having been complimented on the outstanding job they’d done, it surprised them to learn their colleagues in Dallas had assembled the machine in four weeks. Soon another press came up for shipment. The Stratford crew, given two weeks to take down the machine, said they’d show Dallas. The machine was on the freight car in ten days. Piqued by the fact that that the press had arrived before they'd dug their pits and prepared a ceiling aperture, the Dallas crew outdid themselves and put up the machine in four days.
Espey had worked out an ingenious system for the preparation of the pits. Before the move started, he compiled a list of machines requiring pits, and the exact size and location of each. When the time came, he could contract the pit-digging on a mass production basis.
A major headache in the transfer was the duplication of facilities. At one time, move schedules showed five processing tanks from a row of ten were needed in Dallas, while Stratford had need of the other five. The craneway, which served the row of ten tanks, was needed in both places. Tube bending equipment and some anodizing equipment was needed in both Dallas and Stratford. Subcontracting work at one end or the other solved the problem. A similar situation arose with the cafeteria equipment. Halfway through the move, when large staffs were operating at both plants, the equipment was needed at both ends of the line. Sometimes other divisions of United Aircraft were called upon to play a role in the move. When the jaws of the Sheridan Stretch Press broke a short time before its work was finished in Stratford, Hamilton Standard Propellers, in East Stratford, turned out the unfinished parts that the Stratford plant needed.
 The system for installing equipment worked smoothly, and the new Dallas plant gradually came to life. After the training section had been tooled up, and electrical installations were made, the plant machine shop and sheet metal sections began to take form to accommodate the newly trained men. Subassembly departments were set up afterwards, and about the beginning of 1949, final assembly fixtures began arriving. At that time, all of the basic functions of the plant had begun, although the task was by no means finished. Hundreds of freight cars were yet to come from Stratford, much surplus equipment remained to be cleared out of the factory, and there were still wide-open spaces on the factory floor. The work of installing improved lighting fixtures and air cooling units still had a long way to go. Besides the work of rehabilitation, there was a lot of new construction going on within and adjoining the “B” plant. Principally, there was the new engineering building, a three story structure encompassing some 132,826 square feet of floor space. Chance Vought took advantage of this new construction to modernize its engineering facilities. The new building was to contain a hydraulics laboratory and an improved, radio-shielded room. Another major construction project was the building of a Metalite area. Metalite, a revolutionary light construction material of balsa wood encased in a tough, light, metal sheathing, had evolved at Chance Vought as a solution to some of its own specific engineering problems, but and aroused considerable interest among other industries. Hence, an enlarged Metalite operation was contemplated in planning the new facility. Metalite had been manufactured on a small scale in Stratford in what was termed a “pilot plant”. Now, plans called for a production plant four times as big, covering 51,000 square feet of enclosed, air-conditioned and dust proof area with closely controlled temperature and humidity. Other areas for processing steel and aluminum, duplication of similar areas in Stratford, also had to be built and a hospital was constructed. In the factory area, many new offices were built, and partitions erected for cribs and special department functions.
Coming into Dallas when construction was at a peak and new residential developments and office buildings were being constructed in great quantity, it was a problem for Espey to find a contractor who could find time for the extensive building at Chance Vought. He submitted invitations to bid to eight contractors. Five answered that they had their hands full with such extensive backlogs that they could not even consider the work. Of the others, with a buyer’s market prevailing in construction, prices were high. At length, however, Espey reached a satisfactory agreement with one, and the construction work on the new engineering building began, adjacent to the west wall of the existing office building. Finding a contractor was just the beginning of Chance Vought’s troubles. The extensive building that had produced a tight construction situation in Dallas had also produced a shortage of such materials as steel. This, too, caused a delay in construction. At length, the building was under way. Once it had started, it proceeded rapidly. With the bulk of it being done in the brief, but unpredictable winter, a few more minor obstacles were encountered. Ice formed on the steel girders as the third floor of the building went up, and the construction workers could not climb them to do their work. The unusual cold, too, prevented concrete pouring at times. But the engineers, migrating to Dallas as the building was under construction, made their temporary housing in the third floor of the office building do until, in the spring of 1949, they gradually began to take over their building. Some moved into the first floor while the construction men were still working on the second and third floors. Then filtering up to the second floor, at last they were established in their new, modern building.
Though the construction and rehabilitation programs were not without numerous headaches, order at last came from chaos. The order was such a great improvement over the old order, and so perfectly suited to Chance Vought’s operations, present and future, that Chance Vought could look over its new facility and know that the major maintenance work had been done and would not have to be duplicated for many years to come. So another of the economies Chance Vought had anticipated became a reality.
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