Ford celebrates 100 years of assembly line production

A century after its introduction of the first moving assembly line, Ford Motor Co continues to advance its manufacturing efforts worldwide.

At an event on Monday, at the Dearborn-based automaker's Highland Park assembly plant, to mark the 100-year anniversary of the first moving assembly line, the brainchild of Henry Ford, the automaker outlined numerous future production goals, including plans to step up its global flexible manufacturing.

The initiative would give Ford greater adaptability based on varying customer demand by 2017.

Ford, which is on track to produce 6 million vehicles in 2013, also projected 90 per cent of its plants around the world would be running on a three-shift or crew model by 2017, helping increase production time over 30 per cent.

''One hundred years ago, my great-grandfather had a vision to build safe and efficient transportation for everyone,'' said Ford executive chairman Bill Ford in a statement. ''I am proud he was able to bring the freedom of mobility to millions by making cars affordable to families and that his vision of serving people still drives everything we do today.''

Up till 8 October 1913, when the first assembly line was introduced at the plant, workers brought each of the Model T's 3,000 components to a work-space where a single car was completely assembled before another took its place, a process that took 12 hours per car.

The assembly line approach broke down the entire manufacturing process down into 84 distinct steps. Groups of workers worked on the car's chassis down the line, as it was pulled by a rope. Thanks to the assembly line a new Model T rolled out of the plant every 90 minutes!

The assembly line cut the money, time and manpower needed to build cars drastically with further refinements over the years, to drop the price of the Model T from $850 to less than $300. Ordinary working people were for the first time, able to afford, what up to then had been a hand-built, expensive luxury carriage.

The factory and Ford, by 1927 were producing Model Ts at a rate of one every 24 seconds, and at one time it was estimated that one out of every two cars on the road was a Model T!

Today, the company's FreeForm Fabrication Technology, or F3T, that the company is readying will cut delivery time for prototype stamped components from between two and six months to three working days.

Ford is also working on extending the capabilities of 3D printing, which creates representations of production components, layer by layer, that can be assembled into testable prototypes.