[Keith Seymore]

A friend just sent me this link. Although it is for a competitor's product, in a different country, there are a lot of similarities between it and the assembly process of the early 1960s (it also is "public domain", so I don't have to worry about posting anything confidential).

Some of the similarities I noticed are:

a) Body shop welding - the manual welding operations would be very similar to how it was done back then (or even when I started in 1979).

b) Notice the bins of material sitting line side, and the little "jitney" trucks pulling material down the aisle

c) Notice the paper manifest copy hanging on the instrument panel. Those would be pulled off and discarded (perhaps 40 years from now someone will be excited to find one of these in their vehicle!).

d) The chassis carrier, which fixtures the front and rear suspensions in position. This is the same way the Tempests (or other unibody construction vehicles) were built.

e) Engine set - very similar to back then

f) Notice the inspection and repair persons (or supervisor) at their "stand up desks" lineside

g) Body drop (although our crane operators would drop the bodies in more of a "free fall")

h) Shipping lot - notice all those vehicles, lined up and ready to be shipped. The volume of vehicles stored was what I was trying to convey in one of my early posts. Also note that some of the vehicles have the windshield wipers pulled up off the windshield: I would be willing to bet that is a "signal" for those specific vehicles, ie, they are to be shipped by rail, or need to be moved to a repair area or something. I may have mentioned this before but we would flag certain vehicles in this way with the repair ticket. A ticket rolled up and stuck in the door handle would mean one thing, a ticket folded and smashed in the vent window would signal something else. FWIW -

K

http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189