If it was put on your car at the factory and has a

[Keith Seymore]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: novadude</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Mark C. said what I was thinking. Engines came to the assembly plants ready to drop in the car. Also, it's not like GM locomotive parts would have been floating around Norwood. Nothing is impossible, but it seems like a strange story.

Similarly, I am always skeptical of stories of 427s going into 396 cars. Any 427s shipped to the assembly plants would have already been allocated to certain jobs. It's not like the had extra engines laying around like bolts in a hardware bin.

Nothing is impossible, but a lot of these stories don't make sense based on the way manufacturing plants are run. </div></div>

Much easier to do in Pontiac, Michigan, since engines were designed, cast, machined and assembled adjacent to the vehicle assembly plant.

Dimitri Toth likes to tell of a friend who hand assembled his own engine, in the experimental engine room, for a '65 GTO that he had ordered.

When the big day came he watched helplessly in horror as blueprinted beauty landed in a non-descript wagon about 6 cars in front of his; he had miscounted (or read the manifest numbers wrong) and introduced the engine onto the motor line too soon.

Conversly, some grandma somewhere must have wondered why she had a station wagon that ran really well...

K

[Dicky]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWHniL8MyMM

[img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/haha.gif[/img] This post reminds me of this song..... [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/beers.gif[/img]

[Keith Seymore]

More relative to the topic at hand:

I have followed literally tens of thousands of GM vehicles down the line as part of my job responsibilities, and another dozen or so for my own purchase.

Any deviation from a production build is tricky, even with a full staff of attentive personnel who are being paid to manage it. Adding individual unrelated pieces of stand alone content (like a stray trailer hitch, or upgraded engine back in the day) is not too bad but as the interactions go up, like with added related electrical content or controls, the complexity skyrockets.

I can say with authority that assembly plants do not look kindly on engineers who shut the line down due to some unintended consequence of a change (whether real or imagined).

K

[novadude]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Keith Seymore</div><div class="ubbcode-body">More relative to the topic at hand:

I have followed literally tens of thousands of GM vehicles down the line as part of my job responsibilities, and another dozen or so for my own purchase.

Any deviation from a production build is tricky, even with a full staff of attentive personnel who are being paid to manage it. Adding individual unrelated pieces of stand alone content (like a stray trailer hitch, or upgraded engine back in the day) is not too bad but as the interactions go up, like with added related electrical content or controls, the complexity skyrockets.

I can say with authority that assembly plants do not look kindly on engineers who shut the line down due to some unintended consequence of a change (whether real or imagined).

K
</div></div>

Thanks. That's what I was thinking too. People say &quot;well, it was different back then&quot;. Maybe so, but a GM assembly line still wasn't run like a tiny job shop where things could easily be changed at will. An Auto Industry giant like GM likely was head-of-the-class for production scheduling, inventory management, etc back in the 1960s.

In my opinion (and it's only opinion, because I wasn't there), A Tonawanda built 427, isn't going to just accidentally wind up in a Baltimore-built 396 Chevelle simply because a line-worker bought a car and wanted one. Logistically it just doesn't seem possible, unless someone did some sneaky things that let a scheduled &quot;427 car&quot; leave with the 396 planned for that particular 396 Chevelle build sequence under the hood. Even if someone could screw with line sequencing, I'd think it would get caught.

How come you never head stories of people that bought and paid for 427s but the cars were actually built with 396s?