OAKVILLE, ON—Ford will spend between $675 million and $725 million to retool its assembly plant here. The Canadian and Ontario governments will contribute approximately $135 million to the effort, which will secure the facility’s 3,000 jobs into the next decade.
CHICAGO—Workers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant have checked the quality of a vehicle’s paint job basically the same way since the plant opened in 1924—by eye. But the factory is now getting a new 3D imaging system that uses 16 computer-controlled cameras to detect the most microscopic grains of dirt in the paint.
LOUISVILLE, KY—More than 5,000 people have applied this month for what turned out to be just 50 factory jobs, some of them temporary, at Ford Motor Co.’s assembly plant here.
DETROIT—A nonprofit community organization is launching an online crowd funding campaign to raise $125,000 to preserve parts of Ford Motor Co.’s historic Highland Park complex, where the moving assembly line was invented.
YPSILANTI TOWNSHIP, MI—The factory where Rosie the Riveter showed that a woman could do a “man’s work” by building World War II-era bombers, will be demolished if money can’t be found to save it.
DEARBORN, MI—Ford is introducing a new technology that promises to decrease costs and delivery time for manufacturing sheet metal parts. Under the process, a piece of sheet metal is clamped around its edges and formed into a 3D shape by two stylus-type tools working together on opposite sides of the sheet.
DEARBORN, MI—Ford will increase the production at its North American facilities by 200,000 units per year, which adds to an earlier capacity rise by 400,000 units in 2012.