I sell manufacturing guages for a living. It is very boreng but I get to visit some cool factories. About a year ago I was working in the guage lab at the Borg Warner plant in Muncie Indiana. It is the plant that made all of the jeep transmissions as well as most of the truck trannys of WWII. I was asking the guage engineers if there were any items left from the war years. One said they still used an old cletrec the government gave the plant in the early war years. He took me out to the plant and showed me this cool piece of equipment.
While we were out there an old machinist overheard our discussion. He grabbed me and said there was something else that would be of interest. He said that this massive plant was little more than a garage when the war started. Due to politics or luck Borg got all of these contracts out of the blue. The gov was so eager to get the production up that it agreed to pay for a 100,000 sq ft add on to the pant. After getting permits and setting up contractors they ran into one, deal stopping glitch. THERE WAS NO STEEL. The gov had stopped the sale of steel nationally. With out steel there were no support structures for the roof. The owner of the plant called the gov contracting office to tell them the bad news. The gov contractor without missing a beat told the owner to have all of the factory employees outside to help and an area set aside for the arriving steel the following week. Suprised, the owner agreed. Sure enough the following week 4000 beams arrived. After inspecting the miracle shipment the owner noticed that all of the frames were green and were shaped funny. He asked one of the truck drivers where they came from. The truck driver replied they were Studibaker duece frames. The gov had canceled there contract in favor of the GMC and Studebaker, had been so confident of them winning, they went in full production and produced 4000 frame rails. The gov opted to buy the rails but had no immediate need for them.
They are still there holding the roof up.
If you look close you can see that these are truck frames.
