AUTOMOBILES: Plastic Fords

For ten years whooping moppets have whanged rubber and composition automobiles into other toy automobiles, table legs, baseboards. Thought many a fenderdented father: “If our car were only like that!” dismissed the wish as fantastic.

But last week this wish neared the border line of reality. Henry Ford, 77, gleefully swung an ax with all his lanky might against the plastic rear end of a special Ford car. Then he pointed to the un dented, unmarred finish, announced his company would be mass-producing plastic-bodied automobiles in at least one, at most three years.

If thousands of light, near-collision-proof plastic automobiles ever roll on U. S. highways, a notion and a man should get the glory. The notion was Henry Ford’s: that man should go back to the land, that the use of agricultural products in industry should be multiplied. The man is stoutish, balding Robert Allen Boyer, a chemist who looks older than his 31 years, has silver hairs among the brown.

An ardent believer in boys. Henry Ford discovered Robert Boyer in 1925 while visiting Ford’s Wayside Inn, managed by the boy’s father. Earl Joseph Boyer. Attracted by Robert’s active interest in what made the world go round. Ford took him out of the Framingham High School (near Boston), where he was a hockey and baseball addict, “B” chemistry student, later enrolled him in the Ford Trade School.

A boss’s pet from the start. Boyer blossomed in the F. T. S. He took to such brain-crackers as how to manufacture synthetic wool from soybeans, a type of problem that made experts stare blankly but were longtime reveries of Motor-maker Ford. In the summer of 1930 Ford built him a three-story frame laboratory behind the Museum in Greenfield Village.

Designed as a temporary structure, the lab still stands. In it Boyer and his 28 aides have done many strange things—mostly with soybeans, No. 1 farm product to Henry Ford. From this bean Boyer has extracted lubricating and paint oils, made a synthetic wool, pressed insulating varnish for starters and generators, and also extracts the male sex hormone.

When Henry Ford begins his daily rounds of River Rouge, his first stop is the white-walled Boyer lab, which he thinks will soon be the most renowned building on his property. When his tan, lean face bends next to Boyer’s ruddy, cherubic face over the desk, they look like two schoolboys plotting a prank.

There is nothing either can suggest that is not immediately okayed, put into action.

Recently Boyer needed a 1,000-ton steel press (about the size of a ten-story building) for his plastics experiments. So Ford conspired with him to “steal” one of three giant presses then being delivered to the Production Department, had it sidetracked for Boyer’s exclusive use.

Alert, healthy. Bob Boyer is a Ford man. Just as he now hopes to mold his plastics into cars, his habits have been molded by constant hobnobbing with Ford.

He never smokes nor drinks, likes the same old-fashioned dances his boss likes, even likes to eat roasted soybeans, soybean bread, soybean soup. With a soul-deep belief in every Ford dream, Boyer last week was stunned with joy. His chief gave him authority to order a complete set of dies for the first road model of the plastic automobile.

Unlike most commercial plastics, the Boyer sheets for automobiles look like polished steel. Test panels are 70% cellulose fibre, 30% resin binder, pressed into cloth. Alone the cloth has little strength. But several sheets heat-molded in a 1,000-ton press produce a material superior to steel in everything but tensile strength. It is 50% lighter, 50% cheaper, ten times stronger. Bent like a jackknife in a huge press, plastic panels snap back into shape when the pressure is released. Continual assaults with heavy axes, hammers have no visible effect on the shiny, rustless panels. Their color is not paint but inbred in the plastic. Fenders of this Buck Rogers material, though not quite unbreakable, withdraw from minor collisions with lamp posts, etc., like unhurried rubber balls.

To make his super-plastic. Ford is going to the soil. One million plastic automobiles (average annual Ford production) would consume 50,000 tons of synthetic chemicals, 170,000 tons of agricultural products. Possible makeup: 100,000 bales of cotton (U. S. annual output 12,000,000 bales); 500,000 bushels of wheat (current production 792,332,000 bushels, surplus 250,000,000); 700,000 bushels of soybeans (81,541,000 bushels grown this year); 500,000 bushels of corn (ten-year average yield 2,299,342,000 bushels); lesser amounts of hides, lard, glue, pine pitch, sugar-cane alcohol and flax. Imported materials would be cork, rubber, tung oil and ramie, Egyptian mummy-wrapping fibre. Best of all, wheat, corn and soybeans are interchangeable. Ford can use all three, or only one.

Once formed, Ford’s plastic has not the tensile strength of steel, hence will not be used for frame, chassis or motor blocks. But sheets account for half the steel that goes into modern automobiles. If Ford’s plastic bodies become universal, total U. S. use of steel may be cut 10%. Worried, steelmen sent a long-nosed research committee to Dearborn last month, have not peeped since.

On the surface Henry Ford and Robert Boyer have done more to plague steelmakers than to solve the farm problem. But if their dream is true, the technological novelty known as plastics has graduated from its celluloid-and-Beetleware phase into an instrument of industrial revolution.