Foundry Products Operations

CMM continued to operate in the central business district of Cincinnati and purchased castings from a number of local foundries.

Until this time the company had had some problems with the locations in the business district: at least one flood and a fire had caused it to relocate.

In October 1906 CMM announced plans for a new vertically integrated factory to be built in Oakley, a suburb of Cincinnati.

It was the first production facility in the new industrial park, as a separate organization called the Modern Foundry[6] and was located at the corner of Marburg and Disney Street in Oakley.

By the mid-1930s the Factory Colony was considered one of the world's largest manufacturers of machine tools and employed thousands of workers.

A metallurgist (modeled by Emil Weston, 1900–1990) measures the metal temperature using an optical pyrometer.

A copy of the original photograph is shown in the book They Built a City: 150 Years of Industrial Cincinnati.

In 1973, when the terminal concourse was to be torn down, this mural and 13 others by Reiss were carefully removed and transported for display at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

In 1938, based on his studies of what was happening in Europe and despite a deep recession, Geier launched a program to double the plant size, including construction of a new foundry.

At this site, it developed additional machining and assembly space, which enabled a seven-fold increase in production during World War II.

The Metal Fabricating Division foundry, as it came to be called, supplied all the needs of the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company and its successor, Milacron, Inc. At least three buildings were constructed, totaling more than 300,000 square feet (28,000 m2).

[11] Late in the World War II era, they dropped production considerably, to less than half of that amount, to about 15,000 tons per year.

The CMM Co. Foundry also produced castings for direct sales to other customers, but at a low rate of about 1,000 tons per year.

Because the foundry was wholly owned by CMM, other machine tool makers were reluctant to have their competitor making castings for them.

In 1964 Milacron constructed an entirely new foundry in England to supply castings for its European machine tool business.

The modernized New Foundry was adapted as a metalcasting operation that supplies many companies and customers with a full range of gray and ductile iron castings.

[16] As of the end of 2012, the entire 100-acre site that once held the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company was cleared to bare ground, and now hosts a mixed retail/residential development.

A map showing the location of the Modern Foundry on the left side of the map, at the corner of Marburg and Disney Avenue. The Factory Power building is to the left. Rail tracks were laid to bring raw materials into the power station and the foundry, and to move products from the foundry. Click on image to enlarge.
A mural at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, originally at the Cincinnati Union Terminal depicting Foundry Products Operations
Pouring a large mold is a fiery sight. To the left, flames are shooting from an escape hole -- caused by gas generated by the contact of iron with the relatively cool sand, graphite, linseed oil and other ingredients involved in the mold structure. The man at the left is wielding a skimmer to hold back any impurities floating on the surface of the ladle iron. This photo was taken in January 1942 by the Farm Security Administration but the foundry name was not published for security reasons. It is held in the Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).