The Factory Knows Best – A Stock Vehicle? Anyone who works with machinery constantly has ideas as to how that machinery can be improved. A design that has or develops problems, or an arrangement that is hard to work with (having to take off the frame to empty the ashtrays) always makes us think of possible improvements. For the person who is handy in the machine shop, there is a great temptation to make the improvements and see how they work. Often they do, which is a great source of personal satisfaction. So why not get to work and just do it? A lot of us do just that—replacing rustedin-place original fasteners with stainless, for instance, so we’ll never again have to find a way to drill out broken studs by fitting seven inches of drill motor into five inches of space. Back in about 1964, a major carmaker did a study on what it would take to make its vehicles last twenty years with only minor service—not the usual flood of failed belts, hoses, U-joints, waterpump, exhaust system, and wheel bearings that is normally unleashed at age five. They concluded that small increases in bearing sizes, higher specs in materials, and judicious use of stainless would do the job, and at modest cost. That cost increase, however, would put their products at such a market disadvantage that it would be foolish to put the twentyyear scheme into practice. From recent experience with a 45year-old aircraft engine, I know that the twenty-year-scheme could work —if anyone were willing to pay the increased initial cost. The engine I am concerned with came from a Truman-era military transport plane, and has been outdoors for at least twenty years, lying on the ground. Yet when I crack the installation torque on its stainless or plated fasteners, most of them spin free in my fingers—no twist-offs, no rounded hexes. The exhaust system—made from temperature- and time-resistant inconel —is ready for start-up any time. The
drawback is that this engine was made for aviation, to the highest standards of the engineering of its time. Price was not a major consideration. Now for the other side of the story. Back in the 1960s, I was trying to race a Japanese motorcycle. It was early days for the Japanese industry, and this machine had lots of problems. I was determined to fix all of them. I covered the machine with my own innovations, and I was very proud of my work. Then I crashed. Instead of a simple trip to the dealer for a few dollars’ worth of crash parts, getting running again meant duplication of long hours in the machine shop, making all my neat stuff a second time. I started thinking about this problem of clever prototypes, versus maybe less clever, but low-priced and easily available stock parts. I like to read history, so I knew that in 1945, Messerschmitt’s top aircraft designer Kurt Tank had described the ease with which he was able to pull away from Allied fighters in his oh-sosuperior long-nosed TA-152. What did this mean with respect to the war? It meant nothing, because while Germany could produce these highly superior machines in prototype quantity only, one single factory in the US was rolling out a completed, four-engined B-24 every fifty-five minutes. Yes, Tank’s engineering was superior, but could it defeat thousands of P-47 and P-51 aircraft that were only slightly inferior? Mass production has its drawbacks, but its great strength is that it can deliver into our hands, at low cost, enough tools (airplanes, trucks, ships, etc.) to get the job done. When an American wartime pilot would complain to his crewchief that his engine was running rough, they’d just hang another mass-produced, availablein-quantity engine on the front of it and the problem would be gone. In another often-heard story, an American intelligence man was debriefing a
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German artillery officer. The German had been captured after his battery had knocked out more than a dozen tall, undergunned US M4 tanks. The officer was holding forth on the poor quality and training of US forces. “Oh yeah?” said the American, “Then how come you’re in this cage here and I’m the guy asking the questions?” “Because”, the German replied, “We ran out of shells for our 88 mm gun before you ran out of tanks.” Usable mass-produced goods—even if far from perfect—get the job done because they exist. Better ideas are cheap, but production is the key. I thought about the problem of running an airforce, or a trucking company, or a railroad. Availability of parts and service is crucial to all these undertakings. My modified motorcycle was a success in terms of ideas, but in hardware, it was a failure because I could not produce all the parts I needed as fast as I needed them. I was a boy of ten when my family drove up the Alaska Highway in a 1951 Kaiser. Kaiser was a mass-produced automobile (Henry J. Kaiser had automated the production of Liberty ships during the war) but it was very much an oddball. The hammering of hundreds of miles of dirt road driving resulted in transmission tailshaft leakage that threatened to leave us stranded. A Dawson Creek mechanic told us that, although he couldn’t be sure without prying it out and thereby destroying it, he thought the tailshaft seal was a Ford part. This was tempting because we knew there were no Kaiser parts anywhere north of Vancouver. Fortunately, it was a Ford part, and we were able to continue our journey, but this taught me the value of standardized parts, available everywhere. Think your Lambo or Aston-Martin is a fine car? Think again when you’re stopped in Tok Junction, with a broken halfshaft. Likewise, if your mass-produced