The best-selling vehicle in the US has just run into another roadblock. Ford has been struggling with F-Series pickup production and supply chain issues since last year, but the latest four-day stoppage has nothing to do with aluminum. This time, Ford is having hood problems, and it is working to stamp them out.
Die Job Has Stopped Truck Production Dead
According to a report from the Detroit Free Press, Ford was forced to pause F-150 pickup production at its Dearborn Truck Plant in Michigan on Thursday night. The report said that it was expected to be closed for four days, and that could lead to missed production of thousands of trucks and more than $100 million in revenue.
The problem isn’t at the Truck Plant, it’s at the nearby Dearborn Stamping Plant. Like the name suggests, this plant is used to stamp out body panels.
According to the report, there is a broken hood die at the stamping plant, and that means Ford can’t make hoods. A stamping die is a massive part and is completely custom-made for the part it produces. Even Ford wouldn’t have a spare die or even a spare stamping machine just waiting around.
Stamping body panels is like the large-scale version of those penny crushing machines at every National Historic Site gift shop. A piece of sheet metal, in this case pickup truck hood-sized, is placed in the machine between two mold pieces called dies. The machine compresses the two together and the hood in the middle gets sandwiched into shape. It’s a lot of force, and a lot of money involved.
Ford is already working flat-out at the plant. It has been running two 10-hour shifts because Ford needs to make up for the estimated 60,000 or so trucks it has fallen behind by. Production has been affected by a fire at aluminum supplier Novelis, which made it hard to get the blank sheets that go in the dies.
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