[rotorwrench]

There is a lot left out about the relationship between the Dodge Bothers and Henry Ford. The book by Charles Sorenson "My 40 Years With Ford" has a lot of musings about their relationship both good and not so good. Ford's first big court fight was with the holder of a patent for automobile engine design and that took a while to win in the courts. Ford then did two things to "convince" the shareholders to sell their shares. Part of it was the expansion process which was the lawsuit referred to in that short video. The other part was Ford's start up of the Fordson manufacturing concern. He basically built all that with his own funds on property that he already owned at the Rouge. He told the share holders that he wanted to buy them out and actually offered all of them a very fair price. It was basically take the money or he would shut down the Ford Motor Company and put everything under the Fordson name to start over. Needless to say, they took the millions of dollars he offered and went their own ways. C. Harold Wills and the Dodge brothers went on to build their own cars.

The Dodge brothers built a lot of parts and sub-assemblies for Ford to start out at the old coal yard plant. The move to Piquette Avenue plant was still a fair amount of subbing out of parts and sub-assemblies but the big change over to the Highland Park plant put Ford in a more full swing mode of building their own parts so the Dodge brothers were making less and less stuff for them and building more and more stuff for other fledgling manufacturers. By 1915, Ford was doing as little business with them as he could afford to do. This was about the time he started to go his own way. It was all settled in 1919 after the war was over.