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Originally Posted by Pro Stock John
Keith thanks for the stories from the line.
So how messed up would the line get if you pulled a car early on, or are so many cars getting pulled it's a frequent occurrence?
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See Mitch's post above
Pulling a whole build (either body or chassis) is pretty rare; like a body would have to get dropped out of the clamshell, or speared with a forklift. Sometimes build sheets get mis-installed, or blown away by a random man cooling fan. Maybe once or twice in forty years.
Pulling a whole build due to scheduling, like parts shortage, or during new model introduction, was a bit more frequent. Like a couple times during model launch.
Even then you try to "cheat it" to keep yourself on track, like maybe running an empty carrier where that car would have been, or taping a sign to the windshield to let everybody down stream know what was going on.
Most frequent would be fenders/hoods that get painted wrong (either wrong color or two tone wrong), or wrong emblems. It's not obvious when you are putting those parts on in the extreme boonies of the plant and you don't have any frame of reference other than the build sheet.
It becomes more obvious when those parts make it to the final line, when you are putting red fenders on a tan truck, but even then it can be pretty discreet. I know of trucks that were built Chevy on one side and GMC on the other, that made it past several on line inspectors, a couple post line inspectors, shipping and receiving, dealer prep and into customer hands. That's a whole lotta people not paying very good attention to what they were supposed to be doing.
K