Ford could afford to purchase dedicated steel-stamping presses to churn out pressed-steel crankcases, which were cheaper and used less material than the cast iron employed by other manufacturers
Eventually it was even cheaper to not have a separate crankcase and just cast it with the rest of the engine block, as is now common practice (and has been for around a century).
Shoutout to the Henry Ford Museum located in Dearborn, Michigan which is a treasure trove of 19th and early 20th century technology. A true celebration of, what I would consider, the most physically transformative era in human history thus far.
> some types of manufacturing were done without even the aid of dimensioned drawings
A friend of mine ordered a set of dimensioned drawings for the P-51 Mustang. He was investigating the possibility of going into business making P-51s.
But when talking to people who owned P-51s, he was told that the drawings were made after-the-fact. The true design was encapsulated in the jigs and machinery developed for the factory floor, and they'd all been scrapped after the war.
The drawings were useless.
I'm pretty sure that P-51s are maintained these days by making replacement parts by hand and custom-fitted, a very expensive proposition.
>This meant Ford could purchase parts and materials in large quantities at better prices and schedule regular deliveries, ensuring a steady, reliable delivery of material, which allowed it to maintain just a 10-day supply of parts on hand.
And I thought it was Toyota which pioneered the 'just in time' method.
This is basically the 1910s version of 'move fast and break things.' Tossing out a one-month-old machine for a better one is such a Silicon Valley mindset.
Will the book cover how Ford nearly lost it all in his efforts of improving the manufacturing process and lowering the costs of the Model T? In the end people had enough of the car and wanted something new, but all Ford could produce - arguably really well - was the Model T. The competitors focused their manufacturing process such that they could efficiently reuse components for a handful of years, then they made small changes to make their new models "feel new and exciting", as we see today, which gave them the upper hand when people got fed up of the Model T.
I'm waiting for history to repeat itself with Tesla, but it's not a popular (hi)story to tell. Not as popular as how great an American pioneer Henry Ford was, for sure.