Ford F-150

I just got back from an engineering conference in Detroit on "lightweighting" cars and trucks, which was an exceptionally good one, but one mundane fact set me back in my chair. Ford has four stamping plants making body parts for the new aluminum F-150. At the biggest one, at the old Rouge plant, their stamping line fills an

11-ton-capacity truck with aluminum stamping scrap every 20 minutes. The trucks are lined up to haul it back to the mills.

That's a lot of aluminum. All of the US and European car makers have high-quantity aluminum vehicles in the works, and the world's aluminum producers have been building new plants just to deal with it.

Ford will make around 600,000 F-150s this year, so the scrap rate isn't three-shifts every day, but still...

Reply to
Ed Huntress
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Did they tell you what the alloy is?

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Yes. It is a story I will write for the August or, more likely, the September issue of Fab Shop.

There are four of them. None is a standard Aluminum Association alloy designation. The way Ford handled it is brilliant. GM, Honda, Toyota and others rose to compliment the Ford matreials engineer to designed the system.

It's built "backwards" from the scrap stream and the real behaviors of aluminum alloys. Expect the other major automakers to adopt it.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

So what your saying is Ford starts as scrap and ends as scrap.... :-)

Reply to
Steve W.

I'm told it is "close to 6061" - a heat treatable weldable high strength alloy.

Reply to
clare

The four alloys are defined in ways that give them specific properties, rather than specific secondary alloy constituents. The primary constituents establish the performance parameters, and they are defined in a way that allows the secondary melters to "up-alloy" the scrap in the most efficient way, while staying within the performance catagories. They have four different scrap streams to make this happen.

The system makes sense when you see it in graphical form. It allows very tight control of the alloys while using 1/3 secondary (remelt) material. As the system is put into wider use, the percentage of secondary material will increase and still stay within the designed parameters. Without that, aluminum is going to be too expensive to get very far in car bodies and chassis.

There isn't a lot of welding on the aluminum body of the F-150. There is spot welding and some friction welding, but a lot of it is weld-bond: welding through adhesive. There also are continuous laser welds around the door frames.

Overall, it's much stiffer than earlier aluminum chassis/body structures and it outperforms them in other ways. The joining/assembly-fastening is very complex. On top of that, the body is designed with "break points" that allow easy disassembly for repairs.

There was a new Cadillac chassis on display at the conference. That thing has diecast and extruded aluminum structures all over the place. The diecastings used for the shock towers are amazing. I've never seen anything like them. The result is a huge consolidation of parts -- often 10 to 1, throughout these new structures.

Reply to
Ed Huntress
11 ton truck toting how much ? maybe a ton or two. Maybe 5. How packed is it and how much of it is air.

Might be high in air just to get the stuff moving. I doubt it is chipped into billets.

Mart>> I just got back from an engineering conference in Detroit on

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

And did that 11-ton truck have an overhead cam engine? Did it? Huh? DID IT? Or did it have a PUSHROD engine because the designers knew it was superior for the task of powering a big, manly truck?

(Sorry. Had to. Some passing stupidity wave, I think.)

Reply to
Tim Wescott

It will be interesting when they start getting body damage. 99% of the repairs will be full panel replacement, but the common bed rail dings and minor dents that can be taken out with paint less dent tools will be fun.

Adhesive bonded panels are not bad but I'm not sure what they will do with the welded seams. Some are laser welded at the factory. I'm thinking they may allow TIG like a few other aluminum repair certs do but I haven't looked into it very hard. I really don't plan on getting certified to repair them.... BTDT, wastes a LOT of money. Especially when the companies spec different equipment to do the same job... For a while Ford and GM had different specs on spot welds, The weld itself was the same in the end but they wanted you to use a specific brand of welder to make the weld. Ford liked the Miller units and GM wanted Lenco.

Reply to
Steve W.

11-ton capacity. It was stated as 11 tons of scrap every 20 minutes.

Nope.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

I don't know what kind of engine is in the scrap truck. However, I'll get a chance to look them over in a month or two and I'll report back.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

An interesting way to go with the alloys and use of recycled material. I guess they can get the properties they want that way for those parts. A mate that works in engine development mentioned all the main players using virgin aluminium for cylinder heads to guarantee the properties required which couldn't be done with recycled because of contamination.

Reply to
David Billington

Right, but the plot thckens as you dig deeper into it. Ford's recycling is "tolling," which means that the content of the scrap is known and it goes right back into the same stream. There is no other scrap in the stream aside from dropouts from those Ford plants.

The result is quit different than ordinary scrap.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

The Wall Street Journal had an article on Jan 8th about the shift to Alumin um. According to the article in ten years 18% of all vedicles made in the U.S. will have aluminum bodies. It said there were four companies that cou ld supply the aluminum sheet. Alcoa, Novells, Logan Aluminum, and Constel lium. Did you find out who is supplying Ford? I would expect more than on e company is making the aluminum.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

Alcoa and Novelis.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

In Chemistry we covered the job of the metallurgist in a steel mill, who has to analyze the melt as quickly as he can to minimize the fuel and throughput cost of keeping it molten. In the 60's they said it took about half an hour.

Today handheld X-Ray Fluorescence analyzers make the chemical analysis quick and easy.

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Is that enough to adequately predict the final properties or do they have to make Charpy etc measurements of cooled samples?

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

You should see theBPR Rotax engine plant. All of the machining is done dry so there is no coolant contamination in the feedstock of the "remelt" - their recycling of scrap is 100% - aluminum and steel are both done the same way (obviously separated completely)

Reply to
clare

I hope they won't hit consumers with a disposal cost like CRTs when these need to have the aluminum cleanly separated.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Are they doing their own remelting as part of their casting operation? That would explain the need to eliminate coolant. On the scale Ford is producing scrap, it isn't an issue. They're recycling 100%, too, in four streams.

When their alloys are specified in AA grades, and using multiple suppliers, they need 11 streams. Why that is necessary is kind of complicated. I'll link to my story when it's published.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

There are separate issues here. One is the tolling of their own production scrap. The other is the post-market scrapping of the trucks. The latter is becoming more complicated as aluminum's use in vehicles becomes more sophisticated, because they're using multiple alloys and separating them when trucks are scrapped, so far, does not have a solution.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

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