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2019 Mustang Production Information


ice-capades

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2 hours ago, Zooks527 said:

Good morning, and excuse me for being a bit thick.

When you say "It's not going to last long", are you referring to the production slowdown or the happy dance the prior poster was talking about?

 

I think he's talking about the production. A few posts before "It's not going to last long", he said: Yes, they are back to work; and this is not going to last long. Sure they're working, but I think, still with those dummy steering wheels.

I don' know much about the processes at ford, but I work for a German carmaker. If there's an issue like this, the cars will be "fixed" according to the actual production order.

Edited by Bachi
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2 hours ago, Zooks527 said:

Good morning, and excuse me for being a bit thick.

When you say "It's not going to last long", are you referring to the production slowdown or the happy dance the prior poster was talking about?  I'm kind of assuming you're talking about the happy dance, because it seems that even though the plant is back up and running, no real changes to the situation will take place until a bunch of steering wheels show up at some unknown future point and they can start running through the pile of wheel-less cars out in the lot.

And a side question, if I may.  How do they coordinate getting the steering wheels onto the cars in the hold lot?  Do they do it in place (which seems inefficient) or do they move them back to the plant (which would seem hard to do without a wheel)?

Every car in the plant has a blend number that is used to keep track of what features and such a specific car gets, so when steering wheels do eventually arrive they will come already assigned a coordinating number so it's just a matter of finding the right car. The strange part is, not every car is missing a steering wheel. I don't understand that part. 

There was a bulletin my friend told me about (he works there, I work at a different Ford plant) from the plant manager that came out yesterday that made it sound like this is going to continue for a while. 

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26 minutes ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

Every car in the plant has a blend number that is used to keep track of what features and such a specific car gets, so when steering wheels do eventually arrive they will come already assigned a coordinating number so it's just a matter of finding the right car. The strange part is, not every car is missing a steering wheel. I don't understand that part. 

Thank you for this reply and the one in the other thread as well.

The "some need a wheel / some don't" bit is certainly strange.  I know that the graphics on the steering wheel buttons change depending on the car's options.  It'd be funny if something as small as that is what's driving the issue.

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38 minutes ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

Every car in the plant has a blend number that is used to keep track of what features and such a specific car gets, so when steering wheels do eventually arrive they will come already assigned a coordinating number so it's just a matter of finding the right car. The strange part is, not every car is missing a steering wheel. I don't understand that part. 

There was a bulletin my friend told me about (he works there, I work at a different Ford plant) from the plant manager that came out yesterday that made it sound like this is going to continue for a while. 

hmmmm - round about 4000 cars produced in a week. So they need huge parking areas in Flat Rock to park all those cars without steering wheel. Maybe someone can post a picture, so we can search our cars. ;)

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3 minutes ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

You can find it pretty easily on google earth. The plant is at I-75 and Gibraltar Rd. in Flat Rock

Thank you fuzzymoomoo. True, but how long does it take to fill all the parking areas around the plant? The space is of course limited and - if I understood you correctly - the lack of steering wheels continues. No end in sight. And no idea when this will end?

You apprehended it in an earlier post, that the production may stop again. And it will stop, if I count 1 and 1 together. Isn't there any progress in the delivery timetable from the supplier? Have they continued their strike in Mexico? I thought they have "won" the dispute.

And again, thank you for all these information. We get absolutely no answers from our dealers. They know nothing about such problems.

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The areas circled blue are employee parking lots. The lot circled in green is a holding lot for shipping. There's another holding lot to the north across Vreeland Rd. (I marked it with a green line) where they process international shipments (they bring in stuff from Oakville Assembly in Canada) as well as a drop off point from other plant for loading into trucks for the final leg of their journey.

Regarding the test track to the west, I don't think that's used anymore. In fact I think Ford actually sold or leased it to Bosch for testing. There's a smaller test track they use for squeak and rattle testing but it's hard to make out where it is on that map. 

532296EE-8284-4F3B-A68F-738A980AB971.jpeg

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I re-circled the picture

Yellow is the body shop. Somewhere in there, I think closer to the freeway is where the Stamping area is but I'm not 100% sure on that. I never walked through there when I worked there.

The small red circle is where the fire was a few years ago. The damage visible on the outside from the road only recently (last 6-8 months) got fixed 

The black circle is the paint shop. 

The orange circle is final assembly

the purple circle is the former plastics department where they actually made and painted the front and rear bumper covers for the Mustang (for some reason the Fusion and Continental were never a part of that). That was shut down about a year ago. Not sure what is going to become of that area. It was supposed to be something to do with Lincoln quality control or something like that but since the Continental is probably going away nobody I know who works there knows what’s going to happen with it. 

FC5E9DC5-3987-4BF0-806D-F3E11A137927.jpeg

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1 hour ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

The lot circled in green is a holding lot for shipping. There's another holding lot to the north across Vreeland Rd. (I marked it with a green line) where they process international shipments (they bring in stuff from Oakville Assembly in Canada) as well as a drop off point from other plant for loading into trucks for the final leg of their journey.

 

Doing a rough count and quick multiply, there seem to be about 2500 marked spaces in the green circled area.  Figure another 1/3 of that amount if you were going to dense pack them so that they would need to be moved in blocks gets you to space to store, perhaps, 4000 - 5000 cars.  At 400/day, that could fill up fast, as well as be a logistics nightmare to empty afterwards.

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3 hours ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

The lot across the street is much larger. It's HUGE. 

Pulling it up on Google Maps, yeah, 2x to 3x the size at least.

 

So, figure storage space for up to 20k all-in cars between all the lots.  Certainly enough to hold things while waiting for parts to come in.

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4 minutes ago, Zooks527 said:

Pulling it up on Google Maps, yeah, 2x to 3x the size at least.

 

So, figure storage space for up to 20k all-in cars between all the lots.  Certainly enough to hold things while waiting for parts to come in.

They won't keep unfinished cars in either of those lots. Those are for units awaiting shipment only. 

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2 hours ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

I was wrong about the racetrack apparently 

they’re using it to store all the cars built without steering wheels 

it was full by the end of the night shift on Tuesday morning 

Okay I hope they don't run out of storage space, pulled it up on google maps ;)

There are a few pretty large parking lots right next to the plant. I follow the news about the strike in matamoros, but it's not quite

sure what's actually happening there right now. Some are working some are not. Some will apparently get 20% more, others now want that, too. Big mess.

 

The german dealers don't know anything about that...

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It's really hard to find information about that strike. Practically nobody in the media is reporting on it. American media in particular is too preoccupied on whether or not a fart means the president is a racist sack of shit or not. I'm not surprised nobody over in Europe knows about it. 

The way I understand it, the strike is 3 different unions (if you can call them that. They sound more like a mafia than a union to me) and a BUNCH of different companies involved. I can't find a list of every company effected by it. 

Im not even sure that this is related to the strike, that's just my theory. I actually have no clue where most of the parts come from, unless I'm actually there to read the shipping label which since I work at a different plant, I'm not. 

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Gents,

To piggyback on fuzzymoomoo's post regarding the blend of vehicles and finding which steering wheel goes where:

currently Mustangs with dummy steering wheels (which are actually bare Continental wheels) have a piece of paper on the dashboard with their respective broadcast code written in sharpie.  For argument sake, we'll say there's 4 different codes.  Each car is being distributed to their respective lots where, you guessed it, the wheel will be put on.  In retrospect, 1 repairman can do roughly 30 cars an hour (if not more) as it's not that long of a repair.  What will take the longest is getting it back inside the plant, prerolling the module, then test rolling it, dyno/static, etc, etc.

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56 minutes ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

Im not even sure that this is related to the strike, that's just my theory. I actually have no clue where most of the parts come from, unless I'm actually there to read the shipping label which since I work at a different plant, I'm not. 

No matter if it's related to the strike, fact is that they are missing? Problem is that ford is apparently depending on one supplier.

If there's no other one, we just have to wait.

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11 hours ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

I was wrong about the racetrack apparently 

they’re using it to store all the cars built without steering wheels 

it was full by the end of the night shift on Tuesday morning 

Well, some day, this will be a status symbol - "I don't know about your car, but mine was on a track before it even had a full mile on it!"  ;)

Yeah, the Matamoros strike sure seems to have thin coverage.  I did find a couple of stories, though.

 
Sure does look like a great example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
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