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Production
Trucks carted equipment off the Stratford factory floor. Workers, Dallas-bound, disappeared from the plant. The sound of hammers crating machines to be transferred and heavy clang of freight car couplings blended with the whir of drills, the staccato of rivet guns, the usual noises of aircraft manufacture.
While Chance Vought was moving to Dallas, 123 Corsairs and 3 Pirates were completed at Stratford. Details and subassemblies of 27 additional Pirates were made there and 3 XF7U-1s were completed in the experimental shop. In Dallas, the 27 Pirates were assembled and flown off, and work begun on the next batch of Corsairs. Details were also begun on parts for the F7U, production on other, secret projects went on uninterrupted, and spares for various models of Corsairs were made. Even in normal times, this production schedule, involving three airplanes, two of them new, would have been complex. But move or no move, schedules were carried through. For the manufacturing department, the transfer was a time of transition, not only geographically, but because it brought about a marked change for the better in production methods. Bertram D. Taliaferrio, the factory manager, had for a long time wanted to make improvements in manufacturing techniques and methods and set-up of his various sections. In an established plant, it is difficult and costly to instigate major method changes. With a new plant and a new body of workers, the opportunity had come to streamline production. The big change, one which affected all manufacturing sections and cut production time and costs, was the installation of a new shop load method, controlling the flow of work into the factory.
In Chance Vought’s production, the angle of planning is somewhat like the army’s system of attack. Just as the European invasion was planned for “D” day, so Chance Vought has a designated time – zero – for the completion of each plane. “Zero” for the first F4U-5N to come out of the plant was, for example, April 20, 1949. Taking it from there, George Shaw’s production planning and scheduling group worked backward. If the plane was to meet this completion date, then subassembly of the bulkhead for the front section must be finished at “35”. That is, 35 days prior to April 20. Breaking production down further, a smaller subassembly of the bulkhead would be required 60 days before, and details should be completed 85 days before zero. Shaw’s men, then, would prepare a work order for details to be completed on January 25, 1949, 85 days before April 20. These orders went to Burt Carlson, head of material control, whose men rounded up material and tools for fabrication of details and presented them at the proper time, along with the work order, to the worker assigned to make the part.
Under this method, there was no mass release of orders flooding the factory for a huge number of varied parts. A close check of man hours, and hence the cost of a given part or operation could, in this way, be closely predicted and controlled. In Stratford, when a detail for F6U was completed, Carlson would tell Henry Steinmier, chief tool engineer, to gather up the fabricating tools and ship them to Dallas. On the rare occasion when work had to be done after the tools were gone, a little extra muscle work was required, and a man who was good with the hammer would make the part by hand.
Shortly after the move was announced, the detail section of the manufacturing department sent a small number of foremen and leadmen to Dallas. Harold Rourke, who had been a general foreman, became superintendent of details. The men who began the detail operations necessarily worked under handicaps. Air hammers were breaking cement for the new machinery installation, trucks and towmotors dragging in machinery swarmed over the plant, and dust and noise filled the factory.
Supervisory help was not plentiful, but even though new foremen had to be hired and trained in Chance Vought’s methods, it was just a little more than two months after the move had begun that the first detail parts for the Corsairs were coming out of the detail units. Once production began, since there were many machines that were needed in both Stratford and Dallas, Taliaferro and Rourke decided it was a good time to begin two shifts so that what machines were available could do double duty. The foremen, as a result, had to double up too, to spread themselves over the two shifts. It meant that one foreman might have to oversee four or five units. This two-shift plan, in the early stages, also released machines for training new workers. Gradually, the detail units’ operations multiplied until 7,000 parts were being produced for the Corsair, and still, they were gearing up to the production rate of 20,000 different parts when they started to work on the F7U, and eventually to 30,000 parts including parts for spares.
There was an unusually heavy tooling load during the move. Even in wartime, with a huge quantity of planes rolling off the assembly lines, tooling had been simple compared with the task before Chance Vought’s toolmakers during the move. In wartime, there had been a concentration on one model and now there were three, and spares for other models, and tools were needed in two places. Each plane and each model had its distinct tools and tooling problems. For example, a knuckle fitting for the F4U alone required the use of 41 different tools. At the time of the move, there were 55,000 tools in use on the various models of the planes. Henry Steinmier, chief tool engineer, had to stay in Stratford as manufacturing officer in charge when Taliaferro transferred his office to Dallas. Tool supervision was needed in Dallas too, so a Texan, Earl Williams, was chosen to handle the Dallas tooling section. Six Stratford men went down to help set up the operations, and a lot of new Texans were hired.
The blending of knowledge from the two regions proved to be of great benefit. Innovations, which Texans had developed in their wartime experience in plane manufacture, added to the experience of Chance Vought’s years of turning out a quality product, produced a more economical and efficient operation. A marked improvement in tooling operations was brought about when the old mold loft was set up in a different manner in Dallas to become a streamlined template section with its own blueprint unit. The average time on template manufacture was cut early in the move, and the method of racking templates was set up to save 50% of floor space. A revision in form block method produced a saving in press tooling costs. These were but a few of the reductions in manufacturing costs that Chance Vought was able to make as a result of the move.
With detail parts coming through the factory in quantities, the assembly units began to function. Late in October, the first completely Dallas-built subassembly, an oil tank for the F4U-5, was produced. The problem in subassembly was much the same as in the detail units, there was a shortage of supervision. With 26 units operating, both in Stratford and in Dallas, Bernie Carl, the Superintendent, split up his foremen, placing 13 in each location, assigning them to handle two units each.
The final assembly section was the last section of the plant to be rehabilitated. The final assembly bay was crowded with surplus WWII equipment when major subassemblies for the Pirate began to arrive from Stratford. Lighting fixtures had not yet been installed, and craneways were not in. An insufficient number of stands had arrived. The subassemblies, shipped in midwinter, began to arrive in January by truck and air and, regardless of obstacles, H. K. Bentlage’s final assembly group, mostly composed of foremen new to the job, got the first Pirate off the line in April 1949, and continued to produce one per week thereafter. April also signaled the shop completion of the first Dallas-built Corsair. On April 20, 1949, one year after the commencement of the move, H. M. Horner, president of United Aircraft, came to Dallas to celebrate the anniversary with Vought. At the first “round-up” of Texas plant employees, the “Flying V” brand was burned to the side of the first Texas shop-completed F4U-5 Corsair.
The experimental section of the manufacturing department, once it was installed in its new Dallas quarters, enjoyed many advantages over the Stratford location. Well placed, in relation to its raw stock supply, it had greatly expanded quarters with ample room for operation of machines and for 14 planes. Previously, their space had been adequate for only two planes.
A year after the move had been announced, only a handful of persons remained to be transferred from Stratford. Virtually all of the machinery had been shipped from Stratford and were in their places in the Dallas plant turning out parts. The first F6U-1 Pirate had been finished and the first Corsair had been built. The first XF7U-1 Cutlass, modified in the Dallas plant, was being test-flown and the machine shop and sheet metal sections were turning out parts for both the Corsairs and the Cutlasses. A covey of Corsairs had also come into the plant for installation of high-speed camera equipment, and spares were being produced for the F6U and three different models of the Corsair. It was a tremendous production job done in conjunction with a gigantic equipment move.
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