Did your car company Founder have this Involved Management with their Product ?

[Mark Gregory]

I received this about how Mr Olds who later started the Reo Company was involved with quality at his Plant.

 

Mr. Olds' morning routine.

 The car he would take home at night (apparently he got a new car nightly!), he would drive onto the factory floor the following morning to tell the production staff about any issues. 

Now that 's involved management!_._,_._,_

[TheMoneyPit]

There’s also a story about Henry Leland in the early years of motor production for Cadillac going into the foundry and smashing castings that he thought looked weak... Later he would be the founder of Lincoln before Ford took it out of bankruptcy.

 

Some wild stories about the early years of the automotive industry and the men who made themselves while they made that industry. 

[Rusty_OToole]

Leland was known to be very demanding when it came to precision work. For example in machining pistons the machinist had a "go"and a "no go" gauge that differed by only .002". The finished piston had to fit in one but not the other. If one came out too small it was scrapped. Others considered this wasteful as you could bore a cylinder a trifle undersize and use that piston. Leland disagreed.

 

He gave a talk to the AMA about 1915 in which he describe a visit to a leading English maker of luxury cars. He said their engine facility was 4 times as big as Cadillac's and employed 5 times as many workmen, but they only turned out 15 engines a day where Cadillac turned out 100. Because they had fitters, and fitted each part individually. His advice was to get rid of fitters and equip your shops with the best precision machinery and measuring devices, and make every part identical and interchangeable.

[58L-Y8]

Willie Brewster was reputed to carefully appraise all custom bodies in process in the shop.  Should he find a painted panel he thought wasn't up to his high standards, he would remove a sharp object from his pocket and scratch a big "X" in the paint on the offending panel.  Walt Gosden can verify if this is correct, no doubt knows other examples from the coachbuilding trade.

 

Read Walt's comments below as to the veracity of this anecdote.  It's from the source we have that best can relate the truth of the practices then. 

Edited July 19, 2020 by 58L-Y8
Thanks to Walt for setting the record straight. (see edit history)

[Walt G]

I read/heard about what Brewster was supposed to have done to a panel that he did not deem respectable enough to leave his shop with his name on the body tag or sill plate . Never saw that in writing ( except in a magazine article decades ago) nor did any of the Brewster employees that were around in that era ( or employees or owners of other shops) ever state that to me in person when I spoke to them in the early 1970s. It could be true but I have come to believe that it was a fable made up to confirm how great Brewster bodies were built and finished. There were other ways of noting the dissatisfaction  of a painted panel - chalk mark for instance. To scratch in an x that would have to be sanded, primed in several coats, then a color coat added and then that buffed out ( was this in the era of varnished color coats by brush or painted via spray gun?) would take to long time wise between waiting for the coats of paint and/or varnish to dry - it would take days even weeks , and the coach builders did try to get a example of their work finished within a reasonable amount of time to get the car out of the shop to make room for the next project. There were shop foreman who would be inspecting the level of the job being done while it was being done, they didn't wait until the car was finished to say " dat don't look good" re do it.  Sometimes myths become truth if left alone long enough and passed on.

Would that tactic work to day in the top restoration shops in the country that are restoring cars for the audience at concours ? I do not believe so.

[8E45E]

5 hours ago, Mark Gregory said:

I received this about how Mr Olds who later started the Reo Company was involved with quality at his Plant.

 

Mr. Olds' morning routine.

 The car he would take home at night (apparently he got a new car nightly!), he would drive onto the factory floor the following morning to tell the production staff about any issues. 

Now that 's involved management!_._,_._,_

Sherwood Egbert, Studebaker's President from 1961-1963 would take an Avanti from the production line and drive it to his Proving Ground home along Indiana State highway #2 at over 100 mph on occasion, which didn't make him popular with the Indiana State Police.

 

Craig

[wayne sheldon]

One era builder I know became company president because he got himself that involved. Harry Jewett was a wealthy successful coal broker/merchant with money to burn. Through a friend, he invested money in a small upstart in the automobile manufacturing business, called Paige. Paige from its start had set up a dealership network around the country. Harry Jewett traveled around the continent buying and selling, arranging transportation, for coal. Whenever he was in a town that had a Paige dealer, he would stop in and visit, check up on "his investment". What he found, bothered him a LOT! New cars being repaired, poor quality parts breaking, unhappy customers. So, he took many of the bad parts with him. After collecting pieces for a few months, he attended one of the corporation's board meetings, sat and listened intently for awhile. Then, taking his turn,  put his valise full of bad parts on the table, and took the pieces out, declaring that  "You are already broke, and too stupid to know it!" (Quote may not be exactly accurate.) He continued by showing the various pieces and being an engineer (began as an engineer before brokering coal) himself explaining why each piece had failed. Within a year, Harry Jewett became company president, Fred Paige (for whom the car was named) was ousted from the company, and Harry Jewett began redesigning the entire production process. Within another year, Paige was building quality cars, and within one more year, making an actual profit. From 1913 till the end of production in 1927, Paige made solid profits and paid some of the highest dividends in the industry in all but one year. That one year was the recession year following the Great War that was also the only year Ford lost money between '13 and '27. Harry Jewett, already a millionaire before investing in Paige, made more millions before retiring in 1927 (he was about 65). The rest of the board was also up in age, somewhat wealthy, and used to Harry Jewett running everything. None of them wanted to try to follow in his shoes, so they all retired, and sold Paige Detroit to the Graham brothers who had made a fortune building Graham trucks for Dodge Brothers and wanted to move up into building fine automobiles.

[Rusty_OToole]

Speaking of odd management stories. Did you know how Louis Chevrolet came to leave  General Motors? After being ousted as CEO of GM,  William Durant looked up his old friend racing driver Louis Chevrolet who was starting to make his own cars. Durant became his partner and was a big part in making the Chevrolet a commercial success. Then they leveraged their Chevrolet stock to take over GM.

 

The two got along well except for one thing. Durant didn't like the way Chevrolet smoked cigarettes. This trivial difference eventually split them up. Durant tried to get Chevrolet to switch from hand rolled cigs to cigars, even offered to buy him all the cigars he wanted. Chevrolet blew up. He refused to be bossed around on this point. They had many arguments over this.

 

Mrs Durant explained that it wasn't so much the cigarettes as the way he smoked them. Chevrolet had the habit of rolling a cigarette, sticking it in the corner of his mouth and smoking it down to the butt without taking it out, like a French street corner tough. For some reason this drove Durant nuts. He couldn't bear it. She reported that Durant often came home almost in tears of rage and frustration after one of these fights.

 

In the end Chevrolet sold his GM stock, went away and started the Frontenac company to make speed equipment for Fords and other cars. All over an argument about cigarettes.

[58L-Y8]

Coachbuilder were reputed to set very high quality standards for all bodies that left their shop,  Francis Willoughby, Herman Brunn, and Rudy Creteur come to mind.  Perhaps Walt would share some anecdotes about their methods of operation? 

[8E45E]

As per Automobile Quarterly in 1968, when the Continental Mark III was under development in late 1965, under the code name "Lancelot", there were a number of styling proposal drawings hanging on the wall in the design studio.   Henry Ford II walked in, looked them over, pointed to one and said, "I'd like to drive THAT one home.", which under Henry's rule, was the one chosen for production.

 

Craig

[Walt G]

4 hours ago, 58L-Y8 said:

Coachbuilder were reputed to set very high quality standards for all bodies that left their shop,  Francis Willoughby, Herman Brunn, and Rudy Creteur come to mind.  Perhaps Walt would share some anecdotes about their methods of operation? 

 

I have some material on Brunn, but not much conversation - I have most of the Willoughby files up until the mid 1930s - not who bought what - nor the record books of customers purchases, but Francis Willoughby's personal company photo albums of bodies they built  which I think I mentioned here someplace I bought at an antique  flea market south of Utica, NY 35+ years ago . These show cars in the process of being built - wood framework etc, plus the commercial bodies they built as well, and Rudy Creteur became a friend and he, I , and Austin Clark used to go to lunch on a monthly basis. Oh the stories about customers were just wonderful !   All of this will wind up in articles./stories as I find time to do a thorough job of making sure that everything I write is factual. This will take some time and effort to get accomplished and will most likely wind up on a printed page. Not sure of what publications yet until I get the story done, images and period photographs scanned and sorted etc. which will determine the space/pages that an editor has room for.  Hopefully before the end of the year , at least two of the three topics.

Walt