The writer recalls one manufacturer who, about nine years ago, had an output of about 500 cars for one season. Only recently he paid close to a quarter of a million dollars, if indeed his extra expenses did not bring the total to $300,000, to conduct a twenty-one day convention at his factory covering a site of seventy-nine acres, at which dealers from the four quarters of the country were entertained. He had daily meetings in the big halls of his administration building, and his lieutenants carefully outlined to all the plans of the company for the year, and exploited the line of models. “We have $30,000,000 in materials purchased, and expect to get all this material when we need it for manufacturing cars,” said the big man to his dealers. “But the war in Europe has caused many problems of price and quantify to arise, and heaven only knows what the material situation will be after July 1. I advise you to order all the cars you need—think well of your requirements—and stick by that number. Then you will not be like many are bound to be, who are indifferent to manufacturing conditions—you will have cars to meet the biggest demand the industry ever has known.” That automobile president had the pleasure of meeting thousands of dealers, speaking to more than one thousand of them daily, and with his factory production manager he figured the probable needs of his country-wide organization of dealers and branch houses for the year. It is significant that the few changes he made on his early winter production table, which the writer was permitted to scan, were made only in the “increase columns.” THE PART MACHINING PLAYS. It would lead to the exhaustion of the reader were many details to be given showing how the makers made quantity production and economy of factory operation an assured thing. The largest rooms of wholly automatic machinery were equipped, so that a large amount of crude steel wires, rods, etc., practically go into a factory at one end and come out at the other, fully machined and ready to go into the assembly of a machine. Cylinder boring, all with one operation, takes the place of operations that required many hours. Progressive types of assembly of the finished components of the cars make factories look like the “last words in manufacturing.” Machining crankcases and work of that nature that required hours, is done in minutes. Aluminum, that magic metal of the early days of the automobile industry, when it was comparatively cheap, now enters so largely into engine and other parts that at its greatly increased price it is more than a magic metal. It is no uncommon thing to find in an automobile factory that a machine costing more than one hundred times the maker’s cost of an automobile, has been installed to hasten production.