Go to
Chapter 25

Table of Contents

Chapter 24: Falling Bridges 

You don’t get to go head to head in a problem-solving contest[1] everyday with lower, middle and upper management. Of course it wasn’t billed as a contest but everyone knew that it was. When you come out on top you expect to get recognition for your success. I got recognized, alright – as a threat. To bad for me and for Ford that I didn’t know it then. 

Ford Motor Co. wasn’t about to accept the idea that a black, low-paid, grade seven, affirmative action employee without a college degree could perform any intellectual task better than its upper management team. If it did, it would have to accept the fact that something was wrong with the way its most valuable employees were identified, used and compensated. That would have meant promotions for some GSR employees who hadn’t been considered for promotion as well as less pay and smaller bonuses for upper management. The corollaries were inseparable. 

I discovered the flaw in the problem-solving exercise in the early part of 1985, about five months before the ’86 Taurus went on sale and the new merit system was announced. When I saw how far that got me, I looked for a more acceptable way to distinguish myself. I thought that I had found it with the method used for attaching fiberglass wheel covers to car rims for design reviews. The make-believe fiberglass wheels and wheel covers were too thick and brittle to attach the way real wheel covers where attached. The modelers used a popular body filler called Bondo to put wires on the back of the fiberglass covers and then crawl around on the floor to string the wires through the holes in the real wheels and twist them behind the wheels to hold them in place.  

The system was clumsy, time consuming and it didn’t work well. Nobody liked it. One day a wire broke when the modelers and designers were in the showroom looking over a Sable model on a turntable. The wheel cover sagged and while a modeler went back to the studio to get the materials to fix it Ray Everts complained about the shoddy appearance of the sagging wheel cover and the primitive attachment system that caused it. He expressed his fear that the same thing would happen during an executive review. When he said, “There has to be a better way,” my eyes lit up.  

I said, “What will I get if I find one?” 

Everts didn’t answer.  

I think he was afraid that I would do it, which would force him to give me a bigger raise than he had in mind for me.  

Fault lines in the new merit system were already showing before the first raises were announced. Those whose pay was frozen at the higher levels reasoned that they deserved the highest increases because they wouldn’t have been where they were if they hadn’t earned it. Frank Baylow demanded nothing less than a twelve percenter. The other Master Modelers followed suit. Those of us who were frozen on the low end of the pay scale reasoned that we should get the highest percentages to make up ground we lost through no fault of our own. The people in the middle were afraid that they would never make it to the top if they didn’t get the highest percentages.  

The company didn’t put enough money in the merit increase pot to reward everyone fairly on an individual basis. For Everts and McBain to keep their Masters and their most valued Sculptors happy they had to give them the biggest increases. By doing that, they used up most of the money in the kitty. Some Masters who were expecting twelve percent increases got ten or eleven. The way the arithmetic worked out, no one else would have gotten anything if they hadn’t done it that way. They decided that it would be an insult to give any modeler less than a 3 % increase so some modelers got none.

To justify its new system of rewards without the funding to make it work, the company decided that it should crack down on the practice of inflating performance reviews. I learned about that decision after I attempted to design a better wheel cover attachment system.  

The chore was daunting because we used wheels with four-bolt and five-bolt patterns all of which were held in place by a single nut attached to the hub by a nut screwed over the spindle in the center of the hub. The highest hurtle was the varying thickness of each fiberglass wheel cover. That problem went away when Bob Thacker, the Plastic Shop Supervisor, introduced a way of vacuum-forming the wheel covers out of styrene instead of using layer upon layer of fiberglass. The resulting products were beautiful, lightweight and uniform.  

Now I had a known thickness of material to work with every time. The spindle in the center the stock wheels protruded almost a half inch from the nut. I measured the depth of the back of a wheel cover and the dept of the steel wheel rims to the base of the spindle. Then I made a wooden block with the right thickness, drilled the center to the right depth and inserted a nut that fit the threads of the spindle. I applied a spongy black tape we called telephone tape with a super sticky adhesive on both sides to the back of the block and centered it in the styrene wheel cover.  

Nobody thought that my system would work for some obvious reason so I developed it on my lunchtime and decided to try it out on a derelict model at the end of the studio. It had one tire on the side facing the wall that was jacked up slightly off the floor. When no one was looking. I spun the wheel cover onto the spindle and it bottomed out exactly where I calculated that it would with less than an eight of an inch separation between the edge of the wheel cover and the rim of the wheel. Then I spun the wheel forward to make sure that it spun freely without grabbing the edge of the wheel cover and tighten the nut until it popped. I spun it backward to make sure that it didn’t grab and unscrew. It was odd to see the tire turning while the wheel cover didn’t, but it met the need. It worked. Stage one was a success.  

Now I needed a bigger trial with different wheel covers and different cars. I couldn’t do that on my own. I started bringing people over to the vehicle to show them what I had done. They asked the questions I anticipated. I answered them by spinning the tire each way. For some reason Ray Campau remained skeptical through my demonstration. Most of the others wanted to go into studio mass production right away.  

Jim McBain was particularly enthusiastic about using the “new system” on all of the wheel covers but I told him that we didn’t have a new system yet. All I did was prove the principle in one case. I told him that we had to try it out on as many cars and wheel covers as we could and move them around to see what would happen. To my horror, he declared the demonstration a success and proceeded to get all of the modelers involved in mass production of “our new spin-on wheel cover system.” He asked me to make drawings of the block and dimension it for the Wood Shop to make in quantity. He even sat down with me to “help.” 

The first thing he did was change the thickness of the blocks holding the nut “slightly” to a dimension that the Wood Shop “was used to looking at.” I knew what he meant. Although Ford now officially measured everything in millimeters some things were still measure in inches and common fractions of an inch. My calculations came out to an uncommon fraction of an inch. I reluctantly made the change fearing that it wouldn’t work in every case. It was a good way to test how much tolerance was required for the final product but if McBain stuck to the idea that this would be the final product a “failure” could kill it.  

Then McBain threw me another curve. We had a wheel cover for the Sable that was almost dead flat. Flat surfaces don’t hold their dimensions on thin material as well as crowned ones do and the thinner blocks required for them might not have been thin enough. Again I came up with an oddball dimension. Again McBain “suggested” that I change it. When Ray Campau devised a better way than I had of inserting the nut into the block the die was cast. It was a group effort and everyone was onboard to share the glory.  

At first everything worked wonderfully. That development scared me because it didn’t seem likely that I would identify all of the relevant issues in the first shot. While McBain celebrated the apparent success, I waited for the hidden flaws to reveal themselves. And they did.  

Two of the wheel covers fell off. Mine didn’t. Ray Campau’s didn’t. We immediately saw that the ones that fell off had not been properly prepped for the telephone tape. The styrene surfaces had a slick coating that had to be removed with fine sandpaper. Two modelers didn’t take that step. That should have been an easy fix so nobody worried about it except me. I couldn’t prove it but I was reasonably sure that one of the modelers didn’t prepare his wheel cover properly on purpose to sabotage the effort. I was reasonably sure that the other modeler didn’t do it right because he didn’t care enough to do it right. Either way, the human element was a factor that had to be taken into account.  

We had an embarrassing moment with Fritz Mayhew when Jim McBain tried to show off the easy spin-on wheel cover system and he couldn’t get it to go on. He tried another one and it wouldn’t go on, either. Fritz waited impatiently then made a joke about it and left.

We found out that the wheel cover wouldn’t go on because a thread in the spindle was bent. Another time we couldn’t get a cover to go on because a thread in the nut was bent.  

Again, easy fixes.  

Theoretically we could pick off the glitches one at a time until we had all of them corralled. It didn’t happen in practice because we didn’t have a systematic way of monitoring what happened and why. If a wheel cover grabbed onto the rim or tire while the car was rolling forward and popped off or spun off when it moved backward someone would declare, “See, I told you guys that would happen.” Of course it would happen if the blocks weren’t thick enough to keep the covers from grabbing the wheel rim or the tire if the wheel cover overlapped the rim. That’s what we were trying to determine with the trials – the thickness of the block.  

Engineers always include a margin of “tolerance” to allow for real-world deviations in the way parts came together. By measuring the difference between the wheel covers that stayed on and the ones that came off I found the tolerance. We had to thicken the blocks by a little more than an eighth of an inch. As a stopgap measure we could slip a couple of washers over the spindles of the troublesome wheels or simply carry the wheel covers to the showroom and put them on the models there. For a permanent solution we had to track down why either of those stopgap measures was necessary. Greg Arceri vetoed the washer idea. 

The key to solving the problem was not so much in learning why so many of the wheel covers came off when the cars were rolling, but why some of them stayed on the way they were designed to. This would not have been an issue if I had anything to say about it. It was an issue because I had nothing to say about it.  

The decision-making on the spin-on wheel covers had moved to a higher level and taken on a life of its own. The reason for Fritz’s visit was to show them off to him. Unknown to me, the Director of Large car, Bob Zokus, had also gotten a preview of the spin-ons. Everything worked splendidly for him. He was so impressed that he wanted to show them off to the biggest wheels in the company in the next Taurus/Sable review.  

The ’86 Taurus and Sable were on the road and selling like popcorn in a movie theatre. The fiberglass models we were to display on the turntables in the showroom for the ’87 cars therefore had only minor facelifts. The body sides were the same. The Sable had the same light bar theme. You could see changes in the Taurus front and rear but the wheel covers we were proposing were new and the flat ones for the Sable were a radical departure from anything anyone had done before.  

Just before the big show Dave Turner, of all people, declared that the spin-ons would go of the Sable and the Taurus. He picked up the ones he wanted to use and handed them to random modelers to put on. He spun one of them on himself. I never got to see whether they were the ones Ray Campau or I had prepared or ones that someone else had prepared.  

These were technical details to Turner. He was a Manager and he was managing a big show. The details he cared about were appearance issues; tapelines that simulated door cuts, putting the right medallions, foil or body color in all the right places – things like that. He was so busy that he didn’t have time to listen to my warning against spinning on the covers in the studio instead of carrying them to the showroom and putting them on there. He moved and talked and waved his hands to give directions as though I didn’t exist.  

When the riggers came in to tow the models to the showroom, a Sable wheel cover spun completely off and McBain, red-face, went running down the hall after it. He put it on the seat with the rigger but then I noticed another Sable wheel cover starting to spin. I wanted to take that one off, too, but by then we were at the showroom door and Turner decided that it wouldn’t be a problem, although he didn’t know enough to make that decision. One or two Master Modelers where left in the showroom – out of sight, off course – to fix any unforeseen problem that arose. I wasn’t a Master Modeler so I wasn’t one of them.  

My biggest fear was that one of the wheel covers that looked fine was tightening so much that it was pulling away from the telephone tape. I used the tape so that the wheel cover would come off instead of cracking if too much stress were placed on it. It was a key aspect of the test. If the surface had been prepared correctly there could have been only one reason for the wheel cover to come off and I would know how much tolerance to build into the blocks to keep it from happening again.  

Unfortunately, this trip to the showroom was the first good test. Unfortunately, a wheel cover dropped off during the show. Afterwards, the modelers gathered around Jim McBain and he told us how the show went. He took the disaster with the falling wheel cover with good humor. In no way did he imply that I was at fault. Ray Campau didn’t smile. Most of the others laughed. Some laughed with McBain. Some laughed at me. It was easy to tell the difference.    

When I learned that the problem was episodic rather than systemic, I was reasonably certain that the eighth-inch variation I found that shouldn’t have been there was the major culprit. I talked it over with Ray Campau. He then showed me something about the wheel I used for my first test that would have changed everything if I’d know about it.

The pilot wheel had a quarter-inch plate welded to the rear of the hub that moved the spindle out a quarter of an inch farther than the spindles on most of the other wheels although the rims did not move with the spindle. Ray had it done before I came to the studio to make something else work. He couldn’t remember how many wheels on which cars had the added plate. My guess is that he didn’t consciously recall having it done at all when I gave my demonstration but the reason for his lack of enthusiasm in the beginning was that it tugged at the back of his mind.  

I went to McBain to tell him what we had to do to fix the problem. We had to find the spindles without the plates and add the washers that I proposed to Greg. For some mysterious reason he flatly refused to do it. He said that we could get by with what we had. 

Get by? What was he talking about? The system had no controls. Everybody had a different idea of why the wheel cover fell off in the studio and a different idea for what to do about it. Most of the modelers believed that the wheel covers would hold better if they used epoxy instead of telephone tape. The adhesive wasn’t the problem. We could have gotten around that simply by making the blocks out of the same styrene material that the wheel covers where made of and chemically welding them in place with the right solvent. The problem was compensating for the quarter inch variation in the wheels.  

It soon became apparent to me that we couldn’t make that adjustment by relying on individual modelers to do what was necessary at any given time. Besides, the wheel covers were so easy to spin off and on as they were that the designers usually did it themselves with no thought as to how they would hold up. I had to figure out a way to take the human element out of decisions that would lead to a failure and I came up with one that I knew from our experience would work. McBain didn’t like it because he was in the “solid attachment” camp and my solution called for a part of the attachment to give under stress.  

One morning when I came to work McBain and Arceri approached me grinning from ear to ear and telling me that they had found the solution. They led me to a Sable and pointed to a wheel cover with two nasty-looking wood screws sticking out of a wheel cover at dumb angles. It was a joke. I wanted to laugh with them but I couldn’t. They were laughing away my merit increase as well a better way to attach the wheel covers. They were killing all hope of using what we’d learned to do it right for every studio in the company.  

When I went on loan to Luxury studio, which now had a Supervisor named Rod Leighton, I saw a variation of my modified wheel cover attachment on dozens of Luxury wheels. It was a long aluminum tube Bondoed firmly in place on the wheel cover. The idea was for the tube to slip over the hub that the spindle was mounted on. It was conceptually flawed because the hub was tapered and any outward stress on it would cause it to pop off. That’s why I centered my attention on the spindle.  

I won’t say which Master Modeler in Luxury tried to rip off my idea with his “improved” version of what I showed him when he visited the Taurus studio. He knows what he did. He shared the credit for “his” idea with another Master Modeler in Luxury. Credit turned to embarrassment when their wheel covers started falling off but it didn’t hurt their performance reviews. They got O’s.  

Had I known that anyone got an O after the new Merit Increase system was announced I would not have signed my Performance Review. McBain told me that PR ratings were being dropped across the board. I got an E. It didn’t make sense because several of the categories he marked me down on were areas in which both us knew I excelled. When I called those low ratings to his attention he erased them and replaced them whit EP’s and O’s. But the bottom line was still E. When I asked him what I was lacking in job knowledge, he squirmed a bit then told me that I didn’t know how to operate the PDMS machine.  

The PDMS machine was the latest and greatest electronic tool for digitizing clay surfaces rather than taking points mechanically and cutting templates. Only four people in the entire Design Center had been trained to use the machine. All of them were Master Modelers. There were 40 Master Modelers in the Design Center. When I pointed out that fact, McBain finally broke down and told me that Ray Everts wouldn’t approve a higher rating for me.  

Everts told McBain that he thought I was spending too much of my break time writing and that it made him nervous. I saw Everts during those breaks in the modelers’ room when he came back there for coffee. We exchanged pleasantries. Did he think that I was writing when I was supposed to be modeling? No. That wouldn’t explain why my writing would make him nervous, anyway. He thought that I was making notes on everything I did and everything that he said to me so that I could prepare a case for a lawsuit the way Bill Bowman did. McBain didn’t say so, but the implication was that Everts was preparing for a fight.  

McBain wasn’t supposed to tell me why Everts was so upset with me but I could see that he, too, was curious about what I was writing. Instead of telling him, I went to the back room, got my notebook and showed him. I was writing stories for the Highlight. Did my Highlight revelation change anything? No, it didn’t. I still got an E. Did I protest? Yes, a little. I couldn’t protest too much because McBain assured me that everyone had been marked down a notch and the E was the same as an EP. That may have been true in Large Car. It wasn’t true in other studios.  

Chuck Jones, my friend in the American Motors Plastic Shop who wanted to get into modeling was now a Sculptor at Ford. He was working in the Exterior Preproducion studio next door. Chuck told me that he got an O.  He showed me his paycheck before he got his raise. He was over the midpoint of Sculptor. I was $400 below the midpoint. I needed a 12 % merit increase to get close. The ’86 Taurus went on sale in September 1985. In December I got my raise – 4.3%.  

If you think this business with the wheel covers and my merit increase is only about me, you’re missing the bigger picture. The bigger picture is what happens in any big company when people who know what they are doing and why get put on the sidelines. It’s about the extraordinary couplings of cast systems, class systems and merit systems in corporate America and the political games that go with them. It’s about artificial time limits that delay progress and premature declarations of success that short-circuit real progress toward success gained by early “failures.” It’s why bridges collapse and space shuttles explode. It’s why so many cars have to be recalled, why they cost twice as much as they should and why the price keeps climbing instead of coming down.  

Many little things happen in big companies that make the big things possible or impossible.  

When Bob Zokus retired, Jim McBain told me to start working on the latest wheel cover attachment I showed him. This one used a rotating cylinder attached to the spindle and an aluminum sleeve split along its length that attached to a permanent mount on the wheel cover. It required no special preparation. The split in the sleeve meant that it would clamp securely to the rotating cylinder turned with the wheel and there was enough give in the sleeve to allow for any real-world variation.

I asked McBain why he didn’t let me do it before. He told me that it was because a wheel cover fell off during the show and he was embarrassed. That was old news. The new news was that Zokus was so embarrassed that he didn’t want to see anyone working on wheel cover attachments. He didn’t want to hear about it.   

McBain left the studio soon after he told me to draw up the design for the new attachment. He was easing into his retirement after losing his Manger position and getting bumped down to Supervisor. My new Supervisor was Phil Walker. He inherited my wheel cover attachment drawing from McBain. I’d worked with Phil when he was a Master Modeler in Luxury and I was on loan there from Large Car. Although the time I’d with Leighton can best be described as an exercise in mutual contempt, I didn’t have that  relationship with his friend Phil Walker.  

Unlike Leighton, who was devious and malicious, Phil was open and helpful. He showed me how to use the PDMS machine and we seemed to have many things in common. Our first mutual link was to the town where he grew up, Clarksville, Tennessee. I told him about my experience with the town when I was in the Army. He told me how well he understood my bad feelings about the place because it was as racists as I felt it was. He said that he was once a racist because he was brought up that way and it bothered him so much that he made it his mission to fight it. When he discovered that we were both fans of the humorist Garrison Keeler, he bought a Garrison Keeler book for me as a present.  

Now that he was the Supervisor of the Large Car studio, he told me that he had another present for me. He handed me a nylon “rotating ring” and a brass “r” ring nut – exactly the way I drew them up.  The “r” ring nut was designed to replace the nut on the spindle of the wheel and the rotating ring was designed to slip over it. I didn’t know how much tolerance I would need to get the right fit for the rotating ring so I dimensioned the inside of the ring the same as the outside of the nut with instructions to mill the inside of the ring until it slipped easily over the nut. I couldn’t know how much that would be until it was done and it had the right feel. Then we could measure what we had and know what the inside dimension of the nylon ring should be.  

I showed Walker that the Metal Shop had not taken the step of shaving the inside of the ring until it fit. Walker called me into his office and showed me my drawing. He measured it and told me the obvious. If the matching parts were identical they wouldn’t fit. At first I thought that he had misinterpreted what I did or didn’t understand why I did it. Slowly it dawned on me that he was putting on an elaborate show for the Metal Shop and me with no intention of making the attachment work. With the realization that he was as devious and malicious as his buddy Rod Leighton, I stormed out of the office breathing fire.  

McBain saw me stomping up and down the corridor and asked me what was wrong. I told him. He went with me to Personnel and explained the situation with the Personnel man, Don Jones. McBain arranged for me to change studios without a formal transfer that could hurt me. There was a small catch. Luxury was our sister studio so to avoid any formal paperwork I had to go there. McBain told Jones that it was a bad idea because I would have the same problem with Leighton that I had with Walker. Don Jones assured me that the move would be temporary. In a few weeks, rookie modelers would come into Luxury and I could go somewhere else. There was one other catch. Don Jones was a liar.