Chevrolet assembly plants
 

This thread will serve as a repository for Chevrolet assembly plant pictures, documents and miscellaneous information.

Arlington Plant
 

This thread dedicated to the Arlington plant.

Baltimore plant
 

This thread dedicated to the Baltimore plant.

St Louis Plant
 

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What I think would be a good idea, aside from the pics, questions and dialogue that come from these pics is to add a hashtag to it.

For example on this pic........#stlouis

My reasoning it so that it would be easy to search later in time by plant. so as they say......."have at it boys!"

#stlouis

#Fremont

This photo is from Fremont but it reminded me of something.

Flint Assembly has an unusual arrangement, in that the two final lines come together in the middle of the plant to form a “main aisle”, with assembly action on either side.

As I student I used to host the factory tours, when Boy Scouts or Rotary Club or the DAR or whomever would come in for a plant visit. The tour was very high level and consisted of a run down the main aisle to the end of final and then back.

Flint’s second story is very high as you can see in the second photo. The body drop clamshell operators would show off a bit for the tours, letting the cab and box essentially free fall and then stop abruptly mere inches above the chassis.

It was, admittedly, pretty impressive and the groups were fascinated. They would stand and watch for as long as I would let them.

K

#StLouis

Seeing those guys spraying that car: I mentioned that the movements and promotions within the UAW were solely based on seniority.

That meant you could be pushing a broom one day and then spraying cars the next.

Normally you would give a new employee about three days to work along side a seasoned veteran, with him training, observing and then letting the new guy do all the work (probably way too soon).

I can't imagine what the training would be for painting other than 1 - get plenty of coverage on the show surface and 2- don't get any runs. Anywhere in between that would be acceptable.

Also - the assembler wouldn't have anything to do with the setup (like spray patterns, or volume). That would be taken care of by a skilled trades person - a pipefitter, perhaps - so all the assembler would have to do is show up and pull the trigger.

I did hang out down in final repair when I could and those guys (both short line repair and heavy) were more like what was done at an outside body shop.

K

Fremont plant
 

This thread dedicated to the Fremont plant.

Fremont plant- body drop
 

Fremont body drop.

Hi Steve,

Sorry, but I need to correct you on the spelling of the General Motors plant in Northern California.
The town is ‘Fremont’ and I happen to live here in Fremont.
It was named after John C. Fremont.

I made a very informative thread in the Pontiac section on 06-04-2021 about the Fremont GM plant.
Lots of great photos and information on this New state of the art automotive plant.

Here are a few photos from my article.

Regards, Chris

Great and interesting photos - the first with the two men installing the engine in the chassis appears that both the upper and lower control arms are not painted (neither is the brake drum?). The second with the chassis ready to be mated to the body appears the the control arms are painted black - maybe even with different cross shaft hardware on the upper (nut vs. bolt??) - hard to tell.

Yup, whole lotta things going on there in those two engine photos.
I’ve had several conversations with people about the a-arms, exhaust manifolds, etc.
The oil filter adapter and oil sending unit are also different.

Early Camaro Body by Fisher

1st Gen Monte Carlo production. What’s the apparatus over the engine bay?

It's a specialized tool known as a squaring jig,used to help speed up production during front sheetmetal alignment.You can just spy a guy holding an impact wrench down in the pit in the lower left,getting ready to secure the fender once the guy above gives the word.

Agree with "squaring fixture".

The only adjustment I would make to the previous comment is the guy in the pit is getting ready to shoot the radiator support bolts. The fenders are tight at the door and the fender nose bolts have been shot, but leaving the rad support bolts loose allows you to scoot the front end left or right to square it up.

Hopefully then when it's time to set the hood it goes right in there.

I stood and watched my guys do about 900,000 of those while I leaned on the foreman's desk. One every minute of every working day for about six years.

We didn't (usually) use the fixture, though. Typically those big tools are cumbersome and clunky and slow you down. They get used a little bit when new, and when management (or photographers) are looking, but quickly fall into disuse otherwise.

K

That's "roll test" at Fremont.

The drivers check the steering and brakes and run it up through the gears.

I don't see it (them) but normally there are mirrors front and rear so the driver can check the lights: headlights, high beams, turn signals and brake lights. [Maybe this is a roll test after a short line repair rather than the end of the final line proper].

The controller for the rollers is suspended by the electrical connection from the ceiling (circled). Those raise and lower the rollers for entry and exit. The driver reaches out through the window and grabs it to actuate the push buttons.

K

Great pictures.

I have been wanting to make a few comments about the vehicle audits and process:

As mentioned, some number of production vehicles were pulled and given a rigorous once over. These were done by local quality inspectors and included a drive on public roadways. The internal results were kept and tabulated and fed back to the offending production areas.

What was not mentioned is that at some regular interval (quarterly, maybe) a Central Office auditor would show up and perform a similar review. These results were fed back to headquarters and used to rank the various plants against each other. Results were posted in the audit area and were published in the local plant newpaper for visibility. The red carpet was rolled out for these visiting dignitaries in an attempt to sway the results a point or two.

The corporate audit rankings were also used as a data point when allocating additional production volume or the closing of low performing facilities.

Everybody in the plant (everybody that was halfway engaged) knew where their plant was in the rankings, whether it was towards the top (Detroit P truck chassis, Janesville, Oshawa), middle/middle bottom (Flint, Pontiac) or very bottom (Scarborough Van). Management used that as a dangling sword over the workers' heads.

K

More assembly pics. These are shared on FB by “Cryptopig the Painter”

Interesting mix

That's how it's done.

When I started in Hamtramck it was Volt, Buick Lucerne and Cadillac DTS all down the same line. Hard to find some commonality there.

K

I've added all the 1st gen Camaro pictures I had to JohnZ's assembly article. http://www.camaros.org/assemblyprocess.shtml

I remember being in the Ford Wixom plant - the Town Car, the Continental (fwd), and the Lincoln LS were all on the same line. The Mark VIII was on it's own line (and the cars just sat (covered up) a lot of the time from lack of orders).

Those pictures great to check out.

Fisher Body

Painting Monte Carlos and shipping Camaros. Looks like a bunch of matching SS/RS cars with 14x7 XT’s with caps and rings.

----All the Camaros that I can see clearly are converts as well.....Bill S

I always thought that the hubcaps and trim rings were kept in the car for the dealer install.

Would love to been there to pick out a yenko.

Chevelles + Monte Carlos (and pickups, too) = Flint Assembly.

Still building GM full size trucks today.

K

One of the hardest parts of working in the assembly plant is you want every one that goes by.

I started at Flint in June of 1979.

Here's my '80 pickup (built in September of '79).

I spent my whole summer in the Inspection office with the engineering Vehicle Description Summary, figuring how I wanted to option it out.

K

Along those lines - when I saw they were building pickups with this factory Hurst shifter I knew I had to have one.

I ordered this one up and followed it down the line as it was built. I drove it off the end of the line myself and ran it over to the shipping building.

I left the plant at 1am Tuesday September 30 1986 and by 5pm it was sitting at Graff Chevrolet in Davison Michigan.

That's 9 miles from the plant to Davison but I still had to pay the $525 destination charge.

K

So - to bring it back around to Chevrolet Assembly plants - when I ran the Fender Set area my guy was the one that built these floor mounted shifters up.

He was given a build manifest (a copy of each build sheet for every vehicle to be built that day) ahead of the shift. He would sit at the picnic table, cigarette in one hand and red crayon in the other, and mark every vehicle that had either the M20 (creeper gear) or MY6 (overdrive) transmission and then build them up: take the shift lever and add the boot and retainer ring and appropriate knob and then stage them on a lineside rack. When the correct vehicle presented itself he would stab the shifter assembly into the trans and screw the boot/retaining ring to the floor.

He also did all the RPO U01 cab high running lights with a manual "Yankee screwdriver", which allowed him to work up the line all the way to body drop, and installed every SPID label and Camper Loading label in the glovebox.

K

Some comments about the assembly line coordination/processes:

I ordered it just like the other trucks that my family drove: manual windows and locks, no air, etc. Sometime between the time I ordered the truck and before it was built I got the word that I was going to the Desert Proving Ground. In a panic, I tracked the order down and was able to get air conditioning added to the truck before it was built.

That was only the first hold up. I ordered the truck with the MM7 (aka MY6) manual overdrive trans (It's a MOPAR A833 trans where 3rd gear is 1:1 and 4th gear is an overdrive, with the aforementioned floor mounted Hurst shifter). This was about the time when Mr Gasket was buying out Hurst and, because GM was not sure they could get the shifters, they placed this transmission combination on "Stop Order". I received word that my truck would not be built and so I started fretting about what I might be able to do for "Plan B" (...order the three on the tree Saginaw trans and then replace it with my own Saginaw four speed with a floor shift, etc - which is what I did on the blue truck above).

During this time I was walking through the plant, past the motor line, and I noticed a bunch of these transmissions on pallets: stacked up, dozens and dozens of them. I called the Material Control supervisor over and asked him "...how many of those transmissions do you think you have?".

"Probably a hunnert" he said.

"Don't you think we oughta' build 'em, rather than leaving them sit there?" I suggested.

He thought that was a pretty good idea, so when I got back to the office I mentioned it to my boss (who happened to be in charge of this kind of thing, in addition to his myriad other responsibilities).

We ended up building one hundred of those trucks under a temporary deviation - one of which, coincidentally, was mine.

K

By the way - if you look at the ship date on the invoice you will see it is wrong by one day.

I think this is because the "pay point" was at engine start up on the final line proper.

The time between the pay point and actually clearing the shipping building is unaccounted for. This allows the plant to get the vehicle off their books, even as the vehicle is shuttled around out back or in repair.

K

The jobs where material was built up ahead of time were highly desirable.

What the guys would do is work like fiends for the first few hours and then coast the rest of the day.

One of the guys that built up the transmission crossmember subassemblies would bust his hump for the morning, building up enough material to surround himself in an impenetrable fortress of black primered parts. Then, for the balance of the day, he could kick back and just hang the appropriate crossmember on the feeder conveyor when it got in front of him.

All of this additional "free" time was spent either (1) eating or (2) reading.

K