Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant by Paul Clemens
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At the time of its closing, Budd Detroit was solely a stamping plant. There are all kinds of auto plants, and there are auto plants of all kinds in Detroit, but the three predominant types, by size and conspicuousness, are stamping plants, engine plants, and assembly plants. Assembly plants are the final stage, where the auto body parts from stamping plants and the engines from engine plants and the countless other components, big and small, come together to make a car. Poletown, for instance, is an assembly plant. Fisher Body was a GM stamping plant. New Center Stamping--stamping. Ford Wixom was an assembly plant. The Ford Rouge, as originally conceived, was all-inclusive. Some of these plants, such as Budd and New Center Stamping, are, or were, suppliers. Others belong to the Big Three. But all belong to the same industrial ecosystem.
Assembly plants are distinguished by their assembly lines--Henry Ford's great innovation--which produced middle-class prosperity as surely as moveable type made possible widespread literacy. Similarly, stamping plants like Budd are identifiable by their press lines--the linked presses, arranged in rows, that stamp out auto body parts, with each press performing a separate but sequential operation: blank, form, trim, pierce.
Should you ever find yourself near an active press line, you'll no doubt know it. Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You'd notice collision more than they would. The force required to cut, bend, and form steel--a force mechanical stamping presses producing auto body parts exert many times per minute--is orders of magnitude more than what is required to separate you from life and limb. The first of the six stamping presses in 16-line, one of the Budd plant's primary press lines, had a two-thousand-ton reating--that is, it was capable of delivering a force of that tonnage. By comparison, your femur will snap under less than a single ton of pressure. It'd be difficult to find a stamping plant of long standing without a history of tragedy. In recent decades, OSHA and automation have helped to reduce the human loss--the latter, in large part, by reducing the need for humans altogether.
To be anywhere near an active press line is a total sensory experience. To have stood in a press shop such as Budd's would have been to see, spread across 140,000 square feet, several Stonehenges of steel. What you'd have felt, for a moment or two after a press struck, was a not-so-distant rumble, as if you were standing astride a fault line. What you'd have heard would depend on whether or not you wore earplugs--though you really should've. What you'd have smelled, and to some extent tasted, was the oily mist that, like industrial dew, hovers in the air and then settles atop surfaces in a press shop.
To stand in front of a stamping press and see it up close is to encounter a sight. (I speak here of an inactive press. The space between presses in an active line will be caged off, allowing the robots to do the repetitive work, once supplied by humans, of moving the stampings from press to press along the line.) A couple of stories or more, and a million pounds plus or minus, presses such as those in the Budd press shop seem stuck in another era, a bloated Gilded Age when brute force was the road to riches and when humanity , not yet overcome by its mania for miniaturization, hadn't figured out how to get what it needed by finesse.
Most of the behemoths in the Budd press shop were, by brand, either Danly or Clearing. Whatever their make, the main components of a stamping press are, beginning from the bottom, its base, its bolster, its die, its ram, its crown, and--running from base to crown--its side columns, on which the crown sits and between the ram slides. (Some call the ram the slide for this reason.) The one impermanent piece of the structure is the die, which will be changed out depending on the part. Each stamped part has a specific die that produces it; though necessary, die changes create downtime along a press line. In a state-of-the art stamping plant, die changes are quick--a matter of minutes--and completely automated.
