Chewing It Up

Akron's civilian tire & tube business for 1942 was cut 100% by OPM; its other consumer products were cut 75% by WPB last week. It can no longer (after Feb. 1) use crude rubber in brassieres, bathing suits, belts, golf balls, hundreds of other peacetime goods. Yet Akron is booming.

January sales of the Big Four rubber companies (Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, U.S.) were at record or near-record levels. Firestone shareholders were dazed by their chairman's glowing descriptions of ten new plants and additions. General Tire & Rubber, reporting a 61% increase in 1941 sales, told its stockholders "there is no occasion for fear and panic."

The big rush started in December, when all plants put truck & bus tire output on a 168-hour week basis. Now Akron is setting production records on airplane tires, tank tracks, barrage balloons, bulletproof gas tanks, life rafts, gas masks, thousands of other wartime rubber items. Because the biggest bomber tire uses more rubber than 60 passenger-car tires and the tracks of a medium tank use almost a ton, Akron is "chewing" rubber at a record rate. December consumption was 60-70,000 tons, highest December ever and enough to use up the entire U.S. stockpile (Jesse Jones's figure: 725,000 tons) within a year.

Not all the rubber industry's war work is rubber. Biggest surprise is Firestone's $20,000,000 order for 40-mm. Bofors anti-aircraft gun mounts and carriages. Weeks ahead on this contract, Firestone is also turning out machine-gun clips, other metal war goods. Goodyear is making sub-assemblies for Martin bombers. Goodrich makes fuel tanks and operates a $35,000,000 ordnance plant in Texas. U.S. Rubber makes zippers ("Kwik") for uniforms and operates an $86,000,000 arms plant in Iowa.

Neither war orders nor Government restrictions have pushed civilian rubber goods completely off production lines. Because U.S. homes, factories and automobiles would be crippled without them, the industry is making over 20 million V belts (to run factory motors, refrigerators, oil burners, auto fans, etc.), millions of feet of garden hose (for civilian defense), 40 million feet of fire hose (two years' normal sales).

Used in industry or war work, the bulk of such items will be made from crude rubber. But civilian products must be made largely from reclaimed rubber, ordinarily bypassed by manufacturers because it wears out faster than natural rubber. Now Akron grabs all the reclaimed it can get. Its 1942 goal: 360,000 tons.

But for war orders, once new rubber from the East is cut off and the U.S. stock pile is gone, Akron must look chiefly to synthetic. Jesse Jones's belated $400,000,000 program (TIME, Jan. 26), which promises a 400,000-ton rate of output by mid-1943, faces many a production hurdle; most big rubber companies are old hands at synthetics, but not in any such volume as that. If Akron's current rate of consumption continues, the end of imports and the beginning of self-sufficiency may be separated by a serious gap.

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