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The Shift Starts
When Espey, the facilities manager, told Walter Dowse, plant engineer, and Harold Burger, head maintenance man, that their boys were to be charged with the physical moving of several million pounds of equipment out of the Stratford plant, Dowse and Berger weren’t excited. “Sure, we can take care of it,” they said. It was right up the maintenance team’s alley. The trend of airplane manufacturing is such that the maintenance section of Chance Vought is astonished by no request. For example, a modification may be made on a plane in production, which will cause the plant layout section to recommend that two manufacturing units change places for more efficient material flow. As a result, the maintenance section may have to shift equipment overnight from one unit to another, so that no production time will be lost. During the war, with the swift pace of the industry, these requests came often. Improvements in airplane design were many. Add to that, the expansion required by greatly multiplied production, and the results, a total maintenance team in Chance Vought that was well equipped to handle history’s greatest industrial move. To be sure, the move brought up a myriad of problems never before encountered by Chance Vought’s maintenance. There was, for instance, the fact that electrical voltage was 440 in Dallas and 220 in Stratford. All the 220 volt motors from the thousands of machines had to be removed and converted. Some, the Chance Vought electrical section rewound themselves. Some were sent out for rewinding. No time was lost on this job.  There was a stock of extra motors on hand, and 48-hour service was obtained on those sent out. After the machines had been tagged, the task of the maintenance section consisted of collecting the machines to be shipped on a given day and moving them from their plant locations into the maintenance section. There, the machines were put in tip-top condition, so that they would arrive in Dallas ready to be set up and start running. So, added to the other advantages of the move was the fact that the shift offered the opportunity to put everything into shape to effect a thorough “spring housecleaning”. All of the machines were steam cleaned, oil reservoirs were emptied and fresh oil put in, broken parts were repaired or replaced. Then, to insure the arrival of machinery in Dallas in the perfect condition in which it was shipped, the machines were “preserved” in a black paste known as paralkaytone, and their motors wrapped in waterproof paper. Thus, all precautions against rust or corrosion en route were taken.
Breakage in transit was another hazard to be avoided. The maintenance section’s carpenter shop was estimated to be using, at one point in the move, two carloads of lumber a week for crates, skids, and braces to protect equipment from jolts enroute and to facilitate transportation by towmotors and cranes. The plant’s 75 carpenters made six hundred boxes per week, in all sizes.
After the machines had been removed from their places on the plant floor, the electrical unit of the maintenance section must remove overhead electrical services and pack these to go with the machine. Other follow up work was done by the steamfitting and plumbing unit, which disconnected and removed air hoses and air conditioning equipment. And there was the work of filling in the holes left by machines which must be anchored in pits or smaller holes where machines had been bolted to the factory floor.
While the maintenance section did substantially the same work on all of the machines, their work could hardly fall into a pattern, because of the diversified nature of the machines themselves and the variation in condition. There was, for example, the huge Sheridan Stretch Press. A few weeks before its scheduled moving date, the jaws on the machine broke. Despite the policy that had been maintained during the move not to ship anything that was not in perfect condition, an exception was made in this case. Representatives of the manufacturer could not get to the machine for six to eight weeks. The broken machine was shipped. It was best, the maintenance people decided, to have the machine in transit during the time it would have to be idle.
Most spectacular was the move of the Erie Press. Weighing 238 tons, it presented not one, but a dozen problems. It was a problem to the railroads. Its weight could ruin the freight car wheels and even the very roadbeds. It was a problem to the architects, as it required a deep pit. The architects had to determine whether the floor at the spot where the machine was needed, would stand a pit. Rising on four hydraulic columns to a great height, it was a problem to the plant layout, for the Dallas ceiling was not high enough to permit it to move to its full height. It was a problem, most of all, to the maintenance section, for though they could dismantle the machine into six large parts, individual pieces might weigh as much as 60 tons. A rubber mat between sections of the press weighed two tons. The maintenance section worked around the clock on the job of moving the big press, using eight riggers and three machinists. The disassembly job took six weeks. Section by section, they moved the press over a roadway of timbers into a low-gear truck, and a gandy crane swung it onto railroad cars. At the last section, the job bogged down. Jacks placed under the base of the machine sagged at the standards. They would not support the load. Berger got his men working on some homemade jack standards of chrome steel. That did the trick.
Then the railroads said that the press would have to be skidded on oak timbers the length of a car. None were available. Word got around among the workers. Pat Bernavsky, leader of a bull gang, came to the rescue. He had 200 12 by 12 timbers 30 feet long. Chance Vought had more use for them than he did, he decided. He had them hauled up to the railroad station in time for the Erie to leave on schedule.
A railroad car could stand just so much of the Erie press; so it was carried to the coast on five railroad cars, put aboard the Seatrain Lines to New Orleans and then to Dallas by rail. So that the maintenance men in Dallas might have the benefit of their dismantling experience, Berger had photos shot at various stages of the work. Thus, those assembling the machine had graphic evidence of how to put the machine together, how to wire it, and just how it looked when each section was added.
Despite the wide experience of the men in moving large groups of machinery in a short time, such gargantuan machines as the presses had not been moved. The only previous experience the maintenance men could draw upon was that which they had derived when the machines had come in from the manufacturer and were set up. Even then, they had had a manufacturer’s representative to guide them and they had had time. Taking a machine apart and under pressure was another thing. Regardless of the lack of precedent, the maintenance men got over every hurdle safely and on schedule.
Besides putting all of the plant machinery into tip-top condition, the move accomplished other improvements. With the processing tanks out of use while they were being moved, the maintenance men seized upon this opportunity to metalize the tanks, eliminating the weekly cleaning and painting which had previously been necessary. So the moving accomplished another economy in maintenance cost which would reflect itself far into the future. The maintenance men also fabricated some additional degreaser tanks that were needed in Dallas. These, too, were rustproof; an improvement over the tanks previously used, which had an average life of ten years.
Through the fabrication of new equipment, the processing, preparation and moving of the old, the maintenance section still had the work of keeping the plant spick and span. Beisel was known to be a fanatic on the subject of good housekeeping. With vast areas of the factory floor space now being used for storage (the shelves had gone to Dallas), housekeeping was a difficult task, but the men knew that it had to be done. The maintenance staff was increased from 175 to 240 men, many of whom were recruited from production units whose work was finished. After the maintenance section was through with its job of moving and preparing the machinery and furniture and making boxes and skids for it, there was still a big job to do in assisting the shipping section at the freight yards when the machines finally were put on the road
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