Bob Carpenter

Engineer, 1962-1994 - Ford Motor Company

Bob Carpenter
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Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

September, 2010 - Daniel Strohl

One of the legacies of Henry Ford--adapting the assembly line to the purpose of building cars and of improving its efficiency by analyzing the least movement of the assembly line worker--leads many to claim that Henry himself perfected the assembly line.

Not so. Instead, the task of constantly tweaking and improving the assembly line process fell to many thousands of industrial engineers like Bob Carpenter. Bob, the son of a mechanic and a graduate of Western Michigan University's industrial engineering program, joined Ford in 1962. He was first tasked with doing time studies on the assembly lines at the company's Wayne Assembly Plant, where workers were putting together full-size Fords and Mercurys.

Time studies, Bob explained, help industrial engineers identify ways to make processes more efficient in exactly the same way Henry Ford analyzed the movements of the assembly line worker. ''They were extremely boring, drove me nuts,'' Bob said. ''For these studies, we basically took a stopwatch and timed every process every person does, then identified any available time and put it to use. The unions didn't like us much for that, but as industrial engineers, we were responsible for establishing labor costs.''

The job also entailed fleshing out the details of how assembly line workers were to actually assemble cars and components. ''We'd receive the installation manual, but all it said was what needs to go together--it didn't tell us how it all went together. So we'd have to figure that out, along with what tooling was required to put it together."

Six years down the road, Ford promoted Bob to a staff engineering job at its Allen Park location, where he developed the assembly process sheets that he was previously tasked with interpreting. For a single car, he noted, there would be thousands of sheets filling up huge books that went out to the assembly plants.

Though Allen Park was one step closer, both literally and figuratively, to Ford's Dearborn headquarters, Bob had by this time set his sights on becoming a manufacturing engineering manager, essentially the top engineering job in an assembly plant. He had a few stops to make before he'd reach his goal, however.

First, in about 1972, while still at Allen Park, Bob was promoted into an advanced manufacturing engineering group that was tasked with bringing the first robots onto a Ford assembly line. ''We went to the Kansas City assembly plant, where they were building the Mavericks and the Comets, and set up an entire robotic welding line,'' Bob said. ''The 30 or so Unimate robots we used were extremely primitive, very basic and rudimentary. They were all hydraulically operated and had a lot of movement in them that we couldn't control, and we essentially just mounted a spot weld gun on the end of them.''

With those spot-weld guns, the robots would then weld up the entire sides of the cars, leaving human welders to attach the floors and roofs. Bob said, however, that the robots were entirely autonomous once they were programmed correctly. ''In the United States, this was pretty much the first automated welding line,'' he said. ''We chose the Mavericks and Comets to do this first because they were simple cars without a lot of complex parts.''

As with the time studies, Bob and his group found significant resistance to the robots. ''We suspected some sabotage, but it was nothing significant, and nothing we could prove,'' he said. But before the robot assembly line became operational in 1975, Bob had been hired away by the Kansas City plant's management to become the plant's industrial engineering manager.

The promotion involved moving his family to Kansas City, one of several moves around the country that Ford paid for. ''We're on our 14th house now, and most of those moves were the result of Ford Motor Company,'' Bob said. However, two years later, Bob received yet another promotion, to production engineering manager at the Dearborn Assembly Plant back in Michigan, overseeing both the industrial engineering and process engineering departments while the plant turned out Mustang IIs.

''The process engineers were the ones who worked with the systems engineers, who worked with the design engineers to resolve any assembly line problems,'' Bob explained. ''So eventually, we'd set up teams that included manufacturing engineers and designers to design new products--it saved a lot of time and effort, and we ended up with a much better product.''

Two years into that job, in about 1977, Bob earned another promotion that very nearly fulfilled his career dreams; he became the manufacturing engineering manager at the Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, Michigan. ''That was indeed the top engineering job at that plant,'' Bob said. ''They were tooling up to build the big Bronco at the time, and they hired me up there to help get that under way. But at Ford, it was always seen that being the manufacturing engineering manager at a car plant was another level beyond being the manager at a truck plant. I don't know why--in many cases, the trucks were more complex than the cars--but I took the job and just hoped that I'd get promoted again, to a car plant.''

That did happen, but not right away. Bob had a desire to go into business for himself, so with a partner, he bought a Ford-New Holland tractor dealership in Northern Michigan and ran it for several years until the recession of the early 1980s brought that venture to a halt. He remained in Northern Michigan for another few years at a ductile iron factory, ''but there they didn't care what I was at Ford,'' so by the mid-1980s, he returned to Ford, where he was offered a position at the Ontario Truck Plant near Toronto.

Not long afterward, he reached his ultimate career goal when he was offered the manufacturing engineering manager position at the St. Thomas Assembly Plant, which built full-size Fords and Mercurys.

Yet again, however, he encountered resistance, this time from the Canadian unions, which weren't thrilled with Americans going north of the border to take Canadian jobs. ''The people I dealt with were fine with it, and the company backed me and told the unions, 'This is the guy for the job,' '' Bob said. ''But my family was still in the United States, and after five years in Canada, I had been away from them for too long, so I asked to go back.''

For those of you keeping track, Bob had already been at six different assembly plants and in two different staff engineering assignments. And he wasn't yet finished.

Back in the United States, Bob joined Ford's Alpha group in Dearborn, a group tasked with coming up with new ways to produce cars. ''We had a tremendous budget, and worked with all facets of the company,'' Bob said. ''We'd take a project from cradle to grave: We developed it, we found somebody to do it, and we put it in an assembly plant.''

One project in particular that he recalled set out to use robots to install headliners in cars, something that had never been done before; the process was implemented on the 1987 or 1988 Lincoln Town Car. As with his other robotics endeavor, however, Bob was pulled from the project before it could be completed to return to the manufacturing engineering manager position at the Michigan Truck Plant, where he finished his career at Ford in January 1995.

Looking back on a long and varied career, Bob said it's a ''pretty good accomplishment for a country boy from Richland, Michigan. I worked pretty hard to get to the ME manager position; there wasn't anything going on in the plant that you weren't responsible for as the ME manager, so I really felt like a contributor all through my time in that position. It was a big job.''

This article originally appeared in the September, 2010 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.

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