Trip Through Time The Ford River Rouge Plant

America needs to get their Hands Dirty!

Wow, great video! When Detroit ruled the world in manufacturing with hard, work, skill and expertise! Now it's mostly gone, replaced by "made in China" and we buy it all day every day in America because corporations say we should and all we care about is the dollar.

I worked at Nicholson's dock and terminal on a repair crew back in 1979 or 80 . And worked at the Ford rouge plant and did some repairs on three of Ford's ships the Benson the Henry and the breach. I was a greenhorn welder at the age of 19 or 20 . Great experience though.

They are so proud of those garbage V8’s 😂

All this, but no one was satisfied with the technology... now look where we are. Now we produce little to nothing. Tax structure and regulatory agencies have forced industry to abandon the US and only the remnants of the Boomer generation still have work ethic.
Couldn't leave well enough alone.
It was the elite class and government then and as expected history repeats itself.

When Americ was great.....2024 the only product the make is debt

A past so gone now we have snowflakes building cars I was not there nor were you true grit.

When engineering needed human muscle not computers.

Very fascinating film. Every piece of the car from the metal making to the actual car was made at the same plant. I don't believe they do that anymore. Usually send to other plants to make parts then shipped to another plant for assembly

Would have love to seen the old plant in person.

I worked the hot lines at Kaiser Aluminum .
The process is the same when processing steel & aluminum...
The huge rollers that squeeze the red metal into longer & longer slabs had to be changed often ...
It was a big undertaking , but we could do it in short order ..
The big D.C. motors that drove the sizing rollers were the size of large truck ...
When I had free time I used to go into the operators room & watch my uncle start with a red hot ingot and finish rolling it into the desired thickness which was then rolled into coil..
In another dept they made aluminum foil ..
It was basically the same process but in minature ...
I was 25 when I went to work there & just recently retired .
It was a tough job in a dangerous & hot environment ...
In my time 9 men were killed on the job...
Most I knew , but one man I worked with for yrs ...
He was killed doing a job I had performed dozens of times ...
I hope people can appreciate what men do every day to keep this country moving ..

Why cant we do everything in house anymore? Is that why its called "metal side" cause we made our own steel? Crazy

I've Always Loved Danger.

Came here after listening to a Chuck missler study on Genesis. He was discussing the complexity of a cell and compared it with this plant. He worked for Ford

Last i checked ford is made out of Chinese steel 😂😂😂😂 and aluminum, 😮😮😮😮

I walked passed this evebery morning, up Miller road, to High School every day- I didnt concern myself with college (1989) because I thought id just work at the plant. .boy was I wrong. Thanks, UAW; YOU GREEDY SWINE.

Curious, during this period was this a continuous operation, If anyone would know. I find this fascinating. This is stuff I just didn’t take the time to learn. I’ve worked there, retired Union Ironworker, many times. Powerhouse, assembly, paint. Yeah, a bit different today but, finally learning the intricacies of how it began! Thank you.

Black men and White men working side by side.

Henry Ford developed his concept of making a car in 1 factory, iron ore in one end and car out the other end.! He succeeded, except his rubber plantation in Brazil failed horribly and he teamed up with Harvey Firestone to provide his tires. The former Detroit Lions Owner was Martha Firestone Ford, so the families married into each other, like a European Prince & Princess, to form an 'American Aristocracy'... Willian "Billy" Durant formed GM in Flint, MI, on the concept of combining several car companies and manuf different parts in several cities, delivering them by trains to Flint for final assembly, where they made the chassis, engines & bodies. Flint had the largest factory in the world, "Buick City" which was 1 mile x 1 mile..!! All Gone Now, along with 100,000 union jobs and the destruction of Flint, and many other cities in Michigan and across the U.S. industrial heartland.

I work at the steel mill there as a contractor, and they are currently dismantling the old power plant shown in this video.

I spent my 18 birthday applying for a job cause my dad worked there and was able to help get my older brother a job there and he worked there for 33 years, I sadly was unable to get a job there

Truly amazing factory and organization, when America was on top, what the hell happened!

Good thing my grandfather taught me a lot,no video games for me

Next generation will not have this knowledge, only playing videogames

Back when America was America now almost everything you see says it's made in China

No my phone doesnt listen. Just talking to the apprentice the other day. I asked him if he'd heard of River Rouge. Of course no as hes a teenager. Then this this up. Ill send him the link.

The American Iron Chimney Co., was everywhere' so popular for many thousand' year ... 🌳
when all of a sudden'🏕 termed, "Corporation" came out from space 🦌
Illegal, "the fireplace" became
same as a diesel engine machine in a, "SPARK FREE ZONE"
fell out of fashion, like the currency Nixon no measuring cup'
Upper Canada
KJV*
Amen

How detroit was built

How did this happen? In 20 years we’ve gone from high wages and almost full employment with a vibrant smokestack industry to a nation of computer geeks, paper pushers and burger flippers.

They were pretty rough with those crankshafts brah 🤔

I never knew they had Hulett unloaders at Rouge!

thumb 👍

How many of those workers actually had one of those cars?

And today it's all plastic ,garbage

Hello Ken, when I was young 8-12 yrs old we used to go on tours of the Rouge complex. The thing I remember the most is actually watching them lift huge ingots of steel out of the open hearth soaking pit furnaces and then follow them through multiple steps until they were being rolled into huge rolls of sheet steel. There were many other things that the tours covered but that is what I remember the most. I'm 75 now and the days of those tours are long gone. One of the things that I remember about the stamping plant was that they said they had to drive pilings down 92 ft until they hit bedrock. I grew up in the Dearborn Hts area, had multiple paper routes over 7 years, (10-17 yrs old) and got to know so many FoMoCo employees from that time period. I remember once after I started driving a V8 powered Ford product, one of our neighbors from a few doors down the st was telling me that test HP 289 engines were just put on the dock behind the engineering bldg unguarded that I should get a friend with a truck and go down and grab one. Doing a perp walk was something I never wanted to do so that idea was put out of my mind instantly. The days of the Rouge plant are gone for ever but it was something to behold back in the 1950s. It makes me so sad that America has slipped so far from where we were in the past regarding industry, textiles and so many other things. Making America Great Again is probably going to take decades and I'm sure that I won't be here until it happens, (tears) really tears as I write this.
I think that I could probably write a book on how much the quality of various things have fallen from my youth, bed sheets, quilts, shirts, pants etc, nothing is as good as it was in the past and it makes me so sad and now I really believe our Gov allowed it to happen when things could have been done to prevent it.
George

On one end steel being made on the other end of the building car’s are rolling off the assembly line

Our country is nothing now all the good paying jobs are long gone to a foreign country

I recently had a career at a massive automotive plant. There are many impressive things I could elaborate on but just imagine a complete vehicle rolling off the line every 30 seconds….23 hrs a day 6 days a week. Crazy place! This video is fantastic - Detroit area must have been quite a scene in its hey day!

I remember back in the 70's when the Rouge river caught on fire because it was so polluted.

My grandparents lived near the plant. My grandfather would walk me down to the drawbridge on the Rouge River to watch the freighters loaded with iron ore come in to unload it at the plant in the early 60s. My grandma worked in the cafeteria!

Oh wow, a place of slavery and harsh punishment. Good job ford

Hey, these guys are actually working. Must have been before the UAW got in there

Men not afraid of work!

“Johnson gauge blocks accurate to within 2 millionths of an inch”

I don’t know about that? Can someone confirm.

Everyone thrilled by how amazing.... but no talk about the pollution being generated and displacement (intentionally) of rail travel.

This is how we won WW2..................

Ford needs to lower its prices on New Cars and Trucks from Gas to Electric . Why because back in these days you did not have to mortgage a car or truck .. BUT NOW ...... its 40, 50 , 60 thousand of USA costumers funds to buy one ... its simply ridiculous .

Toured that plant when i was a kid, fantastic memories, detroit was a industrial power house, made so many products know detroit makes nothing much,so sad