A visit to the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan and the Rouge tour will enlighten you. The manufacturing excellence combined with innovation, self-sufficiency, and hard working labor makes Ford America’s favorite car.
Ford Museum
The museum of innovation has multiple exhibits and ancient displays of Henry Ford and the car manufacturing process. Insights to the development of vehicle making are displayed. At the entrance, you can find the ground breaking concrete and shovel used by Thomas Edison who came when the Ford plant was opened.
Other exhibits show the creative and manufacturing innovations used by Americans in the early days. Sewing machines, lathe machines, steam turbines, and cars are among the exhibits. You can even see the original steam turbines Ford used to power his plant!
Other interesting displays include the Presidential cars, violin collection by Henry Ford, and the Dymaxion house among many others. You can see America’s greatest manufacturing and power innovations that revolutionized the production and output.
Font innovations by House Industries make you wonder how much thought went into the creation of the displays and fonts. In the current electronic days, where all creations are computer based and graphics, it is hard to imagine that fonts were actually hand crafted!
Greenfield Village tour takes a day long to visit all the original properties that were moved to the city.
Rouge Tour
Rouge Tour is another interesting tour that provides the live insights of the manufacturing of Ford vehicles. Currently, they are assembling the 2018 Ford-F150 which are all sold out already! Raw material comes to the Rouge and the finished vehicle ships out. The self sufficiency of Ford’s business ensured continued supply and profits. Every Ford-F150 takes six hours to complete assembly and testing in a day.
In the Rouge tour, you can see an interactive presentation of Ford’s history. The lasers and the Four dimensional display of the Ford F150 model popping out of the auditorium is the highlight! You will understand how Ford kept going on towards his passion of vehicles despite the many obstacles he faced. With every obstacle, Ford developed permanent ways of removing the risk in the future.
Next, you will be routed to a self-guided tour of the assembly of Ford F150. You will be astonished by the skill and perfection of the people working. The parts move on a continuous chain belt and the workers assemble the parts by standing at their stations. They work at the speed of one truck per minute! If they miss the vehicle by few seconds, the belt moves along and they miss the chance! There may be some extra measures and precautions to stop the belt though. 🙂
At the end of the Station 2, you can try out the steering wheel display where you will be asked to assemble a model steering wheel. You can take the elevator to the Station 3, where you can see the Factory overview. They have installed Living green roof on the top of the Factory’s manufacturing units to promote clean and healthy air for the workers. The species installed on the roof are self-sufficient and require minimum maintenance. Through the Observation deck, you can identify the units such as the painting unit, furnace, and so on. Ford has taken care to to clean the Rouge river and maintain the environment. Friendly associates will help you navigate the factory tour but do not mention their competitor who took the bail out (GM) with them though! 🙂 At the end, there are different shining models displayed for visitors to take pictures.
There are combo tickets for the Ford museum, Rouge tour, and the Greenfield village. Locals do take year round pass for $250 for frequent visits. They run free buses from the museum to the factory. My favorite Ford models were the Mustang, Hot Rod, the Golden Rod, and the Ford-150 with the moon roof. I was convinced to book the Ford F150 but realized that it was out of my range. 🙂