From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Visit to two Daimler Benz factories near Stuttgart, detailing their composite body and chassis production.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 142\3\ scan0253 | |
| Date | 24th June 1937 guessed | |
| DAIMLER BENZ. On the morning of 11th June we visited two of the Daimler Benz factories near Stuttgart, one producing composite construction bodies on mass production lines and the other producing chassis. The body plant is housed in a large new factory with an aerodrome adjoining and looks as if it could be very quickly converted to aircraft production if the necessity arose. It is equipped with machinery for producing the wooden body members, presses for the metal body parts and they also produce their own press dies. They were turning out 120 composite construction bodies per day and said that they could produce 300 per day if necessary. The wood is cut down locally from the many adjoining forests and we were not particularly impressed with the quality as regards freedom from knots and cracks. Compared with the Opel all metal body construction there was very much more hand work necessary to produce the composite type of body and in addition there appeared to be an equal amount of building jigs in use. There was a good deal of gas welding being done necessitating filing off and smoothing down by hand afterwards to remove the surplus weld. They had one flash welding machine to butt weld the body sides to the rear panel but this weld was considerably shorter than on the Opel cars. We got the impression that the reason they retain the composite construction is because it fits in more economically than all steel construction, with their programme which they said embraces 80 different body types. The complete bodies were not particularly impressive as regards finish, seating comfort or ironmongery fittings which were particularly heavy and ugly. After going round the body factory quickly we were taken to the chassis plant about ten miles away and arrived there during the luncheon period. We were rushed | ||