VIDEO: What it Takes to Build a Ranger

May 17, 2024
<2 MIN READ
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The Ford Silverton Manufacturing Plant in Pretoria, South Africa is one global hubs building the Ranger pickup. Watch this video for a deeper look at how the Ranger comes to life. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look into the production of the new Ford Ranger at the Silverton plant.

See the the cutting-edge technologies and meticulous focus on quality employed in the manufacturing process, including Ford’s first on-site Stamping Plant, a new highly automated Body Shop, sophisticated Paint Shop, vehicle assembly operations on the Trim, Chassis and Final line, and the only Ford-owned and operated Chassis Plant in the world.

Watch now! 

Quick Reads

  1. One vehicle rolls off the production line every two minutes at Ford’s Silverton Manufacturing Plant.

  2. There are almost 600 robots employed on the chassis line to help maintain production volumes with each chassis taking around three hours to build.

  3. There are around 3,000 – 4,000 spot welds in the body of every single Ranger, and corrosion protection is provided by dipping the body in 12 chemical baths prior to painting.

  4. Every Ranger is covered with approximately eight litres of Ford’s innovative 3-Wet High Solids Paint system.

  5. The 3-Wet paint process ensures the durability and chip-resistance appearance customers expect while helping to reduce CO2 and VOC emissions. This is achieved through savings made from reductions in the size of paint booths, decreasing numbers of paint purging, and ovens required to cure the paint.

  6. Each Ranger, after painting, passes through a state-of-the-art paint scanner. This electronic eye can detect coating defects as small as 0.2 mm2, which is smaller than a needle point.

  7. There are more than 2 700 parts in each Ford Ranger. Each vehicle undergoes nearly 1 000 quality confirmation checks before it’s allowed to be sent to a dealership.

  8. A high-pressure Water Test sees every Ranger sprayed with water for 20 minutes, in a controlled pressure test, to replicate the worst rainstorm imaginable.

    The vehicle is then thoroughly inspected for any signs of water ingress.

  9. Once the final quality confirmation checks have been completed inside the factory, each Ford Ranger is tested on the Squeak and Rattle Track, High Speed Track and Rough Road Track, and each vehicle must complete one full pass to be approved for release.

  10. One example of every single Ranger variant is removed from the line at random, every single day, and a selection of lasers and cameras are used to check wheel alignment and headlights, while a quick lap of the Steering Alignment Test Track shows if the steering wheel is on straight and the vehicle tracks straight as an arrow.