Messages

61

Decoding/Numbers / Re: 1969 SS production numbers

« on: January 28, 2016, 05:41:05 PM »

That would be a good reason and might be correct , BUT none of the COPO window stickers or shipper paperwork includes the code Z27 (the SS RPO) on them anywhere.  The totals in that options PDF sheet are the GM reported number of orders that contain the specified RPO number, so if the numbers are correct theoretically there are another 1066 RPO Z27 (after you remove the 311 L89s which were an add on RPO to the L78 option) cars out there somewhere (maybe cars shipped as CKDs to Europe, South America and the Philippines for assembly there)?

62

General Discussion / Re: 3 page GM 69 cross ram installation instructions

« on: January 28, 2016, 03:09:58 AM »

They are in that second link above.

63

General Discussion / Re: 3 page GM 69 cross ram installation instructions

« on: January 27, 2016, 05:12:14 PM »

There is no such thing as a factory cross ram not one ever drove out of Norwood or LA with one on the engine.  Over the counter parts only.  There is a GM spec sheet that list all the parts that go with it and its in the Cross Ram Paper on this site.

http://www.camaros.org/crossram.shtml

There are some "install" pages for the 68 Version in this thread on the site as well,

http://www.camaros.org/forum/index.php?topic=8694.30

Wouldn't really call them much more than illustrations, with some adjustment notes on it.

64

General Discussion / Re: 02D production date

« on: January 19, 2016, 10:48:43 PM »

Usually a build week number on a tag was supposed to be a full 5 days worth of production. So a lone Monday (or any number of days in the week that started in one month and ended in the next) at the end of one month carried its end of the previous month build week over to the rest of days in that the week, then the next months build weeks started the following Monday.

But nothing is written in stone, and sometimes that last lone Monday in one month may have been part of the first build week of the next month.  All we know is that the Cowl tags do not exactly follow the calendar.  Fisher did not appear to change the cowl tags in the middle of a production week, whatever code it started with was carried thru the entire week.  Fisher was free to code their tags to suit their needs and their accounting system.  Also LA was a GMAD plant that operated in a completely different manner than Norwood did with it separate Fisher and Chevrolet operations.

65

General Discussion / Re: 02D production date

« on: January 15, 2016, 02:44:37 PM »

There was a Fairfield fisher body plant located adjacent to the railroad tracks right where the railroad tracks cross RT 4, north of Symmes Street and east of RT 4  It was built in 1948, and closed in 1988.  It was right where Bentley World Packaging is located today.  Don't know if any of the current building is part of the old plant or not, but it was 1.3M square feet in size.  Don't know what bodies they built there.  I would guess it was 15 miles NNW of the Norwood Plant.

This is a little writeup about the plant in the butler county history page.

Fisher Body operated in Fairfield Township and Fairfield from 1947 through 1988. Plans for the plant west of Dixie Highway (Ohio 4), north of Symmes Road and east of the railroad were announced by General Motors April 6, 1945, before the end of World War II. When it opened in September 1947 it was part of the Fisher Body Division, producing parts for GM vehicles. Plant expansions were started in 1954 and 1960, after which the complex included 1.5 million square feet of operations on 108 acres. Employment rose to the 4,200 to 4,500 range in the early 1950s and fell to 2,500 before the plant closed. After August 1984, it was known as the Hamilton-Fairfield stamping plant of the Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada Group (CPC). Nov. 6, 1986, GM announced corporate cutbacks which included the closing of 11 plants employing 29,000 workers. Operations at the Hamilton-Fairfield plant ceased Aug. 31, 1988, with about 100 GM personnel remaining until the end of December 1989 when the property was acquired by Panda Motors Corp., whose plans for its use never materialized. Panda placed the complex on sale in May 1992. During the lifetime of the plant, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (later Chessie and CSX) serviced the GM operation from its Wayne Yards, which was located just south of Symmes Road

66

General Discussion / Re: 02D production date

« on: January 15, 2016, 03:26:22 AM »

Just think of the scheduling and parts control that went and continues to go into an assembly line as complex as building a car up from several thousand parts that all have to get on the right car at the exact time the body rolls by it assembly location.  The main line never stops unless its a real disaster.  Think of the main assembly line like the body of a 2 mile long centipede, with hundreds of pairs of legs.  Every part that gets added to the main body flows down those individual legs (feeder lines) towards the body.  For components that change from vehicle to vehicle they have to be placed on those feeder lines in a specific order to get to the front of the line just as the body they are supposed to go on or in arrives at that assembly station. 

Building cars is not a process where the line worker sees a car coming to his (or her) station that needs a blue steering wheel installed, and he runs off somewhere to get the correct wheel.  Its already on the rack ready to be picked and place on the car with a minimum of movement, and virtually no hunting around for it.  If a part needs to be assembled before it goes on or into the car, it is done either at the far end of the feeder line in a sub assembly area, or while traveling down the feeder line on its way to the car.  The amount of parts scheduling and material handling that goes on in these plants is incredible, considering most of it was done manually back in the day.  Its actually a wonder that cars came out of the plants with all of the parts that the customer actually ordered.

67

General Discussion / Re: 02D production date

« on: January 14, 2016, 10:43:50 PM »

The body number was assigned when the order was accepted at the plant (were talking 69's here) but it may not have been scheduled for a particular build period at that time.  The tag was stamped once probably a week before the actual construction of a particular car was to take place.

Production was scheduled at least 1 week (maybe more) ahead to ensure all the required parts would be available at the plant to meet the requirements of the vehicles to be built that week (or day)  So a week (or so) ahead of actual start of assembly the 4560 cars that could be built in a week were scheduled and the parts needed to make them scheduled for delivery.  Chevrolet always drove production order and determined generally when in time a car would be built, Fisher scheduled that production based on part availability and construction constraints.  The cowl tags for those 4560 cars were stamped with all their info including the assembly week (which if done on a week by week basis would never need to be changed or even looked at when stamping out a batch of tags, and sometimes they just forgot to change it from one batch of 4560 cars to the next) and stuck them in boxes, or some kind of containers and sent to the Fisher plants scheduler.  The Fisher scheduler determined their actual production order on a day to day basis based on their physical constraints.  He would try to group like colors together to save time swapping out paint systems, but then he needed to space out convertibles no closer than 10 to 15 body numbers apart, vinyl top cars no closer than about 7 bodies apart, and anything else that took extra time to install had to be spaced out.  So he had 912 tags and UIOT sheets for cars to be built the next day (or a few days hence) given to him in some random order when he started, and when he was done they were all sorted out and reordered to be the most efficient for Fisher.  Similar to Chevy locking the cars in order, this is how fisher did the same thing for their ide of the plant.  The tags and UIOTs were delivered to the beginning of the line for installation on the firewall and off the body went down the line.

68

General Discussion / Re: 02D production date

« on: January 14, 2016, 09:08:40 PM »

You have to remember that the assembly line was over 2 or 3 miles long in these plants. So if you were a Fisher guy sticking cowl tags onto the firewall on a Friday the last one you attached at 1 minute to midnight (end of second shift) had a long way to travel before it rolled out the other end of the plant.  The guy that came in on Monday AM pulled the next days cowl tags with the new build week coded on them and started attaching them to the next firewall on the line.  Probably didn't happen exactly that way every week, as there were probably a few cars that didn't get on the line by the end of shift on Friday due to delays, or production stoppages during the week so there was probably a few of the previous weeks tags left for the first few cars on Monday but it would be a minimal number.  So that last 02D (in this case) tag hung on the firewall at 1 minute to midnight on the previous Friday still had 2 or 3 days or so of travel time thru the factory to reach the end of the line and out into the parking lot.   

Also the GM guy assigning VIN numbers was somewhere in the middle of the entire line, but the guy recording the last one made for the end of the month report was all the way at the end as the cars left the building on their way to the parking lot, or shipping point lot.  The official birth date of these cars  from the NCRS paperwork is when they were delivered to the parking lot and turned over to the shipper for delivery.

69

General Discussion / Re: 02D production date

« on: January 14, 2016, 01:50:49 AM »

Theres two things to consider when looking at the cowl tag date and the reported last GM VIN number.

1. The GM number is a snapshot in time, its the last car leaving the building at the end of the 2nd shift on the last calendar day of the month.  At that point in time there are still another 2 1/2 to 3 days or so of cars (2500 to 2700) on the line all the way back to the beginning of the Fisher side of the plant.  IF the last calendar day of the month also lined up with the change of build weeks (like its a Friday) then the very first car way back on the Fisher side of the plant that was little more than a firewall would also have an 02D (or whatever the build week was) on the tag.

2. Fisher scheduled build weeks while generally running from Monday to Friday (or Saturday), they did not line up with the actual calendar weeks.  For example if February of 69 ended on a Friday (it actually did) then there was at least 2500 more 02D tag cars on the line.  For every day before the last day of the month being on a Friday add another 912 cars with the same body tag date on it. 

I personally believe that the 02D tag did not get changed on Friday 2/28 like it should have, but instead stayed into the next week. There are lots of oddities as far as which calendar week corresponds to build weeks, with missing weeks, weeks that ran long as well as trying to fit holidays and extended work weeks into the calendar while taking into account that the factory could not build more than 4560 cars over a five day work week.  Haven't been able to fit all the weeks together yet.

70

Restoration / Re: black on tailpan on ss cars

« on: January 06, 2016, 06:22:17 PM »

Does that black SS 396 also have blacked out rockers?  By the taillight chrome it has at least the Z21 style trim package on it, and also appears to be an RS, by the lack of B/U lamp in the center taillamp lens.

71

General Discussion / Re: after market cross ram

« on: December 31, 2015, 02:13:50 PM »

The repro cross rams used to command a massive premium 3 or 4 years ago, going for somewhere around 5K just for the manifolds, these days the allure is over and prices have plunged, but unless you are going for a concourse restoration (which would really require and NOS setup) your probably better off going with an Offenhauser coss ram, other than having offenhauser on them and a pair of loops cast into the manifold for the linkage they are almost identical to the originals, and will only run you about 500 bucks for the base, and the top.  Have the Offenhauser name, linkage supports,  and the extra markings machined off of the loid and get the lid reskinned to make the machined areas match the rest of the manifold and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference.

72

Restoration / Re: black on tailpan on ss cars

« on: December 30, 2015, 02:09:55 PM »

You can't use any of GMs print ads as being technically correct for anything, they were touched up and or made up by the ads designers.  Look at the perimeter of that 68s tail panel, it has a body color pin stripe running around it , and the trunklid emblem is way to high up on the trunklid.  Half that car has been modified by the artists, But yes the rocker and tail panel paint is the same physical paint from the same gun, and its relative glossiness or not has nothing to do with a few degrees of factory air temperature.  There was probably not much concern given to the level of shine or glossiness of this blackout treatment, If there was a requirement for a particular level of gloss and the paint shops couldn't account for variations in humidity, temperatures and any variations in the drying oven temperatures then they probably wouldn't have a job for very long

73

General Discussion / Re: Special paint code rs on ebay.

« on: December 24, 2015, 12:19:09 AM »

Oh no what color could it have been originally, I see a purple like color under the blue?



Seriously, it looks like it was some kind of butternut yellow or a cream color, if its butternut wonder what drove the special paint designation

74

General Discussion / Re: EO Z28 at Mecum Kissimmee 2016

« on: December 23, 2015, 06:27:06 PM »

That looks like a 1970 or so picture from Hee Haw.

Here she is as of last year.


Stll nice.

75

Originality / Re: Firestone Wide Oval redline

« on: December 21, 2015, 06:00:29 PM »

Assuming the car sold new in Canada and you knew the VIN you can get the GM of Canada options list for the car, and that may list the redline tires in the options list for the car.