How about a little build date discussion

[694spdRT]

I thought I would add this little finding to either help or confuse the production date debate. I was going through my paperwork after reading Chris's A31 post and came across this.

My '69 had its buildsheet along with one from a B5 blue Coronet. The line sequence number on the Coronet is right after my car. Here is the wierd part...the scheduled build date for the Coronet is 701 and my Charger is 708 on both the tag and buildsheet. The sequence number on the VIN# for the Coronet is a approximately 4200 cars PRIOR to mine which seems right according to the scheduled dates.

What I am getting from this is perhaps the build dates are not proof positive of when the cars actually went down the line and that is where the "scheduled" term comes from. The part that interests me the most is the fact the VIN sequence which we all use comes into question because this case shows that might not be accurate. The Coronet could really not have been built before my car even though the build date says it was built a week prior.  Is all of this old news to you registry guys.

BTW: This is regarding the St. Louis Plant.

[Alaskan_TA]

That is exactly why the date is called the SPD (scheduled production date) It will get you close, but there is no way to know if any car was actually built on it's SPD.

I have found sheets with SPDs three weeks before or after the SPD of the car they were found in, but the broadcast sequence numbers are usually quite close.

T/Ake care,
Barry

[694spdRT]

Thanks for the info Barry. I figured this was nothing new.

So how does the sequence number on the actual VIN get determined? In the case above the Coronet was 4,200 cars ahead of mine but, went down the assembly line at the same time. Is that # put in at the time the scheduled production date is figured? If that is the case it is not really accurate to say a car was the 1xx,xxxth numbered car built at the plant like we commonly say either or am I missing something?   

[JimShine]

I know this doesn't answer the question, but it is related and an interesting read. It is from The Winged Warriors site: http://wwnboa.com/slaprer.htm


VIN tags didn't appear until the car was in the Trim department. They were situated in order in wooden trays and brought down from the Broadcast Area which was then located overhead. In later years, the Broadcast Area was moved down to the floor.

The fender tags appeared in the body shop. They were stamped by a machine that ran across the blank tag like a typewriter, done very fast. The fender tags were located on the inner fender because that is the one part that every car had and were all the same basic construction to use as a reference point.

Gary also told us how those VIN stampings were made. There were two motor lines at the plant. When a car went through the motor line, as soon as the transmission was installed, it received VIN stampings. There were five sets of fixtures, there were numbers that went into each fixture and then it was clamped onto the engine. A pneumatic burp gun was then used to stamp the VIN into the metal. The engine was painted before the numbers were stamped, so the numbers were left in bare metal.

The confidential numbers that were stamped on various other parts of the car were stamped with a huge machine...so big you could hardly pull it down to make the stamping. The confidential numbers were painted over in the bodyshop. Gary remembers one humorous episode where a new hire was supposed to be putting the confidential numbers on the cars as they came by his station. A foreman saw him sitting there leisurely reading a magazine and went over to ask why he wasn't up working. The new hire answered that this was the "easiest job in the world" and didn't take much time so he was relaxing in-between cars. Wondering how he could be stamping each of those cars with different numbers and have that much free time, the foreman stood back and watched the new hire as the next car came down the line. He simply stood up and pulled the machine down and stamped the numbers on the car body-without ever changing the numbers! He had been stamping the same numbers on every car!

Broadcast sheet paper came to the plant pre-printed and folded in boxes. IBM teletype machines printed the various codes on broadcast sheets. The Broadcast Office at the front of the plant sent information about each car coordinated to small offices where there were machines located. Gary reports that there were 30 track (broadcast) machines in the plant. There were five small printing machines in Paint and Bodyshop alone. Part of his job was to empty the trash barrels of track sheets (which, incidentally are now recycled). Imagine how many of those much-sought-after broadcast sheets Gary sent to the landfill!

The long, skinny aluminum tag that you sometimes see affixed to the forward screw on the fender ID tag is an inspector's tag. It will have a punched hole through it to signify that an inspector has looked at that car. The bodyshop had the aluminum strips for the inspectors to punch. Sometimes you will also find a hole punched through the fender tag itself. This is also an inspector's punch.

Here's a good example of how things could really get screwed up in the factory. One day, an inspector went to the area where the radiator core supports were being built and told them he'd "bought off" four hours worth of cars. He stamped (punched) inspectors tags for all of them, which amounted to about 250 cars, and then went home to lunch. As luck would have it, the cars got out of sequence that day in the assembly plant and the bodies were wrong. His job was to insure that the bodies were drilled correctly for the chrome. All of these 250 cars, which were on dollys in the metal shop, had to be coordinated with the correct track sheets. This caused the assembly line to be shut down for an hour while they got the cars back in sequence. The inspector got fired for about a week and then was transferred to another department.

[Alaskan_TA]

I am not sure how sequential VIN numbers were assigned, but say as an example that you had two cars with VINs of;

JH23B0B 555555

&

JH23B0B 555556

If 555555 was an N95 car, they may have held the number until they intended to build a whole string of N95 cars. The numbers above are made up, but I have seen one case so far where the above scenario is true. 55 could have been built weeks after 56.

With an assembly line involved, there were things they could do to make the line run faster and smoother. Building cars with the same paint color and interior code the same day would be another good example.

Barry

[tan top]

fascinating stuff guys

[Just 6T9 CHGR]

I have several examples of this in the 69 registry.

[694spdRT]

I suppose if the Vin sequence # is determined earlier it is possible my car was made earlier than 708 also. Or is the scheduled date usually the earliest a car is built?

[Alaskan_TA]

Before or after the SPD is hard to tell. If your car is mostly original, check all the date cdes you can find. My T/A has a SPD of 417 but the matching #s engine was assembled days later. You can get close sometimes, but not the exact build day.

For those of you that have found broadcast sheets in your cars for your car and another car or two, please send copies of the sheets to the registriy or registries as the case may be, seeing two sheets for different cars built close together helps us figure some of this stuff out. 

T/Ake care,
Barry

[694spdRT]

My engine and tranny were MIA when I got it. The Dana 60 is original. I also noticed a date code on the steering gear too.