Every F-35 in service traces back to one building on Harvard Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. The aircraft is not assembled around a welded frame. It is built around a spine of enormous aluminium die forgings, and all of the large ones come off one shop floor. Under the 2007 Lockheed Martin award to Alcoa, now Howmet Aerospace, each airframe receives fifteen large bulkhead forgings and six wing box components. The bulkheads carry wing and engine loads, run from 10 to 23 feet in length, and weigh between 1,800 and 6,000 pounds as forged, before machining strips most of it away. The machine that makes them is a Cold War survivor. Built by Mesta Machinery of West Homestead, Pennsylvania under the Air Force Heavy Press Program, the 50,000-ton press entered service on 5 May 1955. - 87 feet tall, with roughly half the structure buried below the shop floor - A frame weighing close to 8,000 tons - Eight rams at 4,500 psi hydraulic pressure across a six-foot stroke - A die table measuring 26 by 12...