If you are looking to read a story about early days in the Chrysler 300 Club, you can stop now. However, if you are interested in life in a 1970’s Chrysler engine plant, read on.

I was in university and got an after-hours job working in a local stamping plant. The machines were colossal and the plant was stamping out valve covers, oil pans and other unidentifiable parts for International Harvester. The shift would start with a single horrendous boom as the first machine pounded out a part and then the noise would escalate into multiple thunderous booms. You could actually feel the tremors through the cement of the plant floor. One day, I found myself working a machine on the oil pan line. There were four presses in a row that took the flat piece of steel to a finished oil pan. After the machines had done their stamp, a large steel bar with arms would grab the piece and pass it on to the operator of the next machine in line. This unloading was accomplished by the steel bar swinging in an upward arc. I was reaching for the part being passed to me when the unloader double tripped. I tilted my head back in the last second and felt the wind of the bar passing by my face. I was pretty shook-up and was very grateful when Chrysler called the next day offering me a summer student job.

So, at 11 PM on June the 18^th, 1971, I started my 46 and a half years employment with Chrysler. I reported to the camshaft department for the midnight shift. In those days we were machining parts and building the faithful 225 CID Slant Six and the new 360 CID V8 engine. After almost losing my head at the stamping plant, I was darn glad to be at the engine plant, but the environment was no bed of roses, no Sunday picnic. The plant smelled of smoke, oil fumes and the ever-present stink of the coolant (oil and water mixture) that was used to cool the tooling in every machining operation. The raw castings came in the door and ran through the various machines, drilling, cutting and grinding their way to a finished product ready for assembly. In the machining area rust particles were air borne. If you had pockets in your clothing, they would have a layer of fine rust by the end of the shift. The foreman wore company supplied white shirts and the pockets would really be showing the rust. If you were sweating, your neck and scalp would be rusty. The company supplied us with gloves, both rubber and cotton. As a cost savings, they would have the gloves washed. It was not uncommon to pull on a pair of washed gloves and find the finger tips full of metal chips. It was a dull, drab place. In addition to the dust and smoke, the machines were all painted in a dull light green, accented by oil and black grease. On the plus side it was not anywhere close to the noise level of the stamping plant.

My first job was operating a large lathe that cut down the four main bearings on the slant six cam to almost finished size. This was a no brainer job. All I had to do was use a “C” shaped gauge to ensure the cutters were doing their job. When the machine came close to going out of spec., not enough material was coming off, I just called a Job Setter who would come and replace or rotate the five-sided cutters and I was back in business. I showed some aptitude and the Foreman moved me to the next machine in line, which was the grinder for the finished cam bearings. I loved that machine. It demanded attention and was tricky to have those bearings come out to the proper size. It was a huge grinder with grinding wheels in the five-foot diameter range. There is an offset hole drilled in the end of the camshafts. You would load the cam in the machine placing the ends in a fixture just like a lathe. There was a drive pin that went into the offset hole. The two center bearings were pushed towards the grinding wheels by a steady rest so the cam was in place in a slight arc. When you started the machine, the cam would start to rotate and the grinding wheels would start to spin and the grinding wheels would rush in a fast forward mode. Just before touching the cam the forward motion of the grinding wheels would slow to a crawl and then gently grind the bearings to a finished diameter. I as the operator had a set of diamond cutters that I used to trim the grinding stones to insure the proper diameter for the finished bearings. That was the tricky part, the challenge to trim the grinding wheels to keep the cam bearings in spec.

Some of you who have taken apart original engines for a rebuild, may have noticed various slashes of coloured ink. Just like the identification marks on various parts from the car assembly line, these are accountability markings placed on the parts by the machine operators. We had access to gallons of the various ink colours and not all of the ink ended up on parts. We considered it a great feat of daring-do to sneak up behind our fellow workers and give the back of their work boots a nice slash of colour.

When I first started at Chrysler, I took an aptitude test for skilled trades. If you passed, your name went on a list in order by seniority. After a few years, I was asked to become a foreman and I found myself, along with two other foremen, running a three-shift operation for machining V8 exhaust manifolds. In those days, engines were the bottleneck for making cars. In other words, every engine we could make was a car the company could build. So, the engine plant ran 24-7 for machining with the engine assembly lines working a day shift only. This eventually became a real burden. I remember my record being 108 days without a day off and a lot of those days were 12-hour shifts. In the fall of 1978, my name had risen to the top of the seniority list for skilled trades. I was told that the apprenticeship being offered was for a car/truck mechanic in the Transportation Building. This was the one and only time that Chrysler Canada offered this program and out of the roughly four thousand employees only four of us received that offer.

So, that ended my engine plant tenure. Two years later the engine plant was shut down and the production was transferred to engine plants in the US. In 1980 the plant met the wrecking ball after 42 years of production. A new plant was erected in its place where the raw bodies for Windsor Assembly are fashioned together. All that’s left of the engine plant is a memorial plaque dedicated to the many workers who worked there and the many who became victims of Cancer.

In later years, I became the Maintenance Manager for the Windsor Terminal. The best part of that job was specifying new equipment. There came a time when we were about to order a replacement fleet of trucks. Freightliner was in the running for a contract with us and a group of us were offered a tour of the Detroit Diesel Engine Plant. The plant we toured was involved with engine assembly and machining and assembling differentials. When we went to the area of the plant that was involved with machining the ring and pinion components, I was expecting to see the familiar smoke haze, smell the burnt oil smell and hear the sounds of machining. NOTHING! Every phase of the machining operation was accomplished in a sealed and ventilated enclosure and with advanced metallurgy in the tooling there was no coolant being used. The finished ring and pinions came out like they were chrome plated. What a leap for the environment and for worker’s health.

Coming in the next edition, I have a story or two about my days in Transportation.