Edsel Ford and Charles Sorenson met with Fred Rentschler and me in the boardroom in East Hartford. Sorenson did most of the talking, though Edsel Ford was president of the company. A rough-and-tumble shopman of the Ford school of give and take, Sorenson wasted few words. His men had looked the shop over and found nothing complicated about it—nothing they didn’t savvy. The machine tools seemed standard and the processes excellent. At first his boys had thought the job looked easy, but the more they had seen of our precision, the more they had become impressed with the task before them. At first they had thought we might be overdoing the quality but after a look at the test-shed running and studying the high demands for durability and dependability, they had changed their minds. They realized it was a tough racket but were prepared to go ahead on two conditions. First, they would have to adopt our technique in every detail and even have to build a complete new aircraft-engine shop; the idea that their tool room would serve was fantastic, the machines wouldn’t do at all. Second, they would have to have access to our suppliers and subcontractors for parts; they could not find other sources of supply. He presumed, of course, that we would give them every assistance and even detail our foremen and leading men to duty in the Ford shops as necessary. Sorenson’s requirement as to our suppliers posed a problem; most of them were already overloaded. Some like Wyman Gordon, of Worcester, source of our crankshaft and other forgings, were already suppliers to the automotive industry, and could shift their production from autos to aircraft. This had been a long-time feature of our war plans and it applied to many of our parts. On the others we would share the output with Ford and join him in creating new sources. With that decision we all shook hands and it was a deal.