Projects Body damage from the factory?

In addition to getting some more wet sanding done on the Fairlane, (hoping to spray more red tomorrow) we had noticed a large patch of lead in the B-pillar on the passenger side. Used the torch to melt it out, only to reveal a nice hole punched in. Judging from the direction the striking object must have travelled, it appears the door was not installed at the time. Looks like it had to be damaged and repaired at the factory??











Anyone ever see damage like this from the factory?

 

gunshot. but yes, I have seen some things like that but it's rare.

 

sounds plausible, and its kinda cool. I guess then they would have had big spot welders that were supported on an overhead wire somehow, and moved around by men to spot the shell together, maybe one of those swung into the shell during building it and they patched the resulting hole rather than throw the body out?

 

Looking at the gas weld bead and the brazing (?) on the quarter panel, I would say thats not factory but evidence of a repair at some time. The hole would have been to plug the porto power in and pull the pillar back into shape.
I See,every day ,cars damaged in transit to the dealers ,brandnew ones. it's fairly common for cars to have seen some panel work before delivery.

 

I worked at a Ford dealer in 64 & 65 servicing new cars, that stuff would show up every once in a while and get fixed at the dealer.

 

It has the brass from gas welding on both quarters like that, as well as in quite a few other places (again, on both sides of the car), with no apparent damage anywhere else. The quarter was about as straight as you can get, with factory spot welds and seam sealer still in place.

...............and no bullet holes in the door

 

You'd be surprized how much damage happens at the factory.

 

If a car is built, then damaged, it sure as hell will never get thrown out, it will get fixed. Sometimes a good fix, sometimes rather cheesy.

 

you would be amazed at how many cars get damaged during assembly.
My neighbors job at Fords is to do nothing but fix fucked up new cars all day long.

 

Spot welder, seen it ,done it.

 

Could have happened in transit too. New cars used to be shipped in open-sided rail cars (called autoracks) until the late Seventies at least, and were frequent targets of rocks and bullets. When I was growing up a neighbor worked as a manager of the service department of a Ford dealer and once talked about all the vandalism damage they had to correct, including a railroad spike through a windshield.

That looks like a bullet hole to me, and since it's so low on the body and angled slightly upward my guess is that the car may have been on the first or second tier of a rail car when it happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorack

 

you would be surprised to know how damage is done between the factory and the dealership.railroad.

 

Fuck ups on the line too. Chevy dealer called us, at the trim shop, back about '85 to replace the vinyl top on a Cavalier. We looked it up , and our supplier had no VTs listed. So we go to the dealership, and they run the VIN on the GM computer or something. Guess what...no vinyl top. We go out back with the guy, and there sits this crappy Cavalier with a "shell top". Whoever unloaded the car from the transporter had somehow dropped a chain on it, from the deck above, and a nice hole resulted.
This rocked on for a few days and the dealership called back. Guess what! The top was scheduled for a Caddillac Cimmaron, but was installed on the Cavalier instead

 

about 10 or 15 years ago I got to take a trip to Oregon and spend a day at the Toyota repair facility where they fix the screw ups that happen on the ship. Some pretty heavy duty stuff that the new owner never knows about.

 

not uncommon. i used to know an old guy (dead now) who worked for ford doing repair work on assembly line cars. all the work was done in lead.

 

Yup, saw stuff like that in the early 70s working at Ford dealerships. Not that unusual. Parts were same way. I used to pick up the dealer's order daily at the "will call" docks of the Detroit and National Parts depots back then. We were told to unwrap & check ALL sheet metal before signing for it, so we'd strip the paper or cardboard off it and check for damage. If we found a dent they'd call the "ding man" to come out and make repairs if he could.

 

Back in the late 60's I worked at a Datsun dealer. One day all kinds of yelling and curseing in Greek from the 2 predelivery guys. One of them is covered with a whiteish oily substance Turns out the rear end was full of salt water mixed with gear oil. The tranny was also. The engine had been drained and new oil put in and the truck had driven off the transporter. The odd thing was there was a lot of serious rust under the truck but someone had painted every thing they could get to by crawling underneath black with a brush. Datsun distributor took the truck back. About the same time I went to Porshe service school in NJ. One time the class was a 912 tranny overhaul the other a 911 engine overhaul. Both had been beat up on the docks. There were another 1/2 dozen there that were damaged the same way by abuse. Don't know if it was the longshoremen in NJ didn't like Germans or didn't like Porshes. but probably if you complained to much you ended iup in the swamp with Jimmy Hoffa.

 

I see it every day at work, those big old hanging spotwelders are a real handful and it's easy to miss once in awhile. Most of ours operate at about 600 PSI at the electrodes, some higher. They'll tear the shit out of sheetmetal not to mention human appendages.

 

Could have been a defect in the steel or in the stamping operation and not caught by quality control until it was too late.

 

I'll bet there are all kinds of stories that happen in auto plants. A few years ago, one of the Mustang mags had a small picture of an original '69 Mustang 1/4 panel that had rusted and been replaced during the restoration. Inside the quarter panel, someone on the line had written "Fuck this car" in seam sealer prior to it being welded on the body at the plant. Having worked in factories before, I thought it was hilarious. A freind of mine had a similar experience, and didn't see the humor in it. It was '73 and he traded his '68 Camaro, RS/SS 396, 4 spd in on a brand new '73 Vega GT. On the way home with his new car, he glanced down at the "GT" emblem on the horn button and saw a faint "fuck you" scratched into the plastic botton. When he wiped it with his finger, it was perfectly smooth. Someone at the factory had scratched it into the clear plastic (in reverse!) so that you could read it from the driver's seat, but not wipe it off. Again, I laughed my ass off, but then again, I wasn't making payments on it...

 

My Grandfather worked his entire career as an engineer at Chysler Corp. in Detroit.

He told me a story about a slew of cars getting to final inspection at the end of the line; seems each car had a 3" ding in the same spot on the lower door skin. Engineering was called in as they thought it was something to do with tooling. Come to find out it was one of the line workers fitiing final interior pieces-he has back kicking the door shut after each car was fitted, LO. All those cars were sent back for body/paint.

I was told that cars to be painted black are ID'd when in bare metal; the straightest ones are tagged for black as they need less work , whereas the wavey ones get white, etc.

I stripped a 55 Chevy to bare metal once and under the factory paint/primer there were a couple of leaded dings.

 

I got a friend who used to work at the [national] receiving yard for Isuzu. This was back in the early 80's. He told me of a whole ship-load of new isuzu pup-trucks that had gone thru a huricane in the middle of the ocean, and all of them had damage.

The policy was that if the damage exceeded $500, the truck was to be scrapped and written off for insurance. He got the job of crushing them... Pull the tires, drain the fluids, and squash 'em flat! Said he did about 150 of them.

kinda makes you wonder how bad some of the "survivors" were!

 

I am not sure the "fuck you" is the worst of what your friend might still remembers about the trade on either of those cars. But in perspective, it now definitely does seem like it was in fact a big fuck you.

 

I replaced a cab on a 72 GMC. New cab came in a crate. Opened the crate up, and found pick hammer marks all over the inside of the back of the cab, lead on the outside. The primer was over the pick marks and the lead.

My BIL was an inspector at the Ford Trenton stamping plant. I mentioned it to him, and he said parts with a minor ding were primed and shipped as replacement parts, they blamed the dings on the shipper.

 

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the cars the automakers donate to autoshop programs at jr. colleges!!! Back in the day there'd be some *killer* firebirds, hot cars at the time, that had been completely tweeked in shipping and unsaleable so they'd donate 'em.

 

There was a legendary body man in town, who started working on cars pre-WW2. Crusty and profane old guy, in his 60s when I was a teen in the 1960s. Owned more odd special body hammers than I've ever seen in one shop, did hand lettering and striping, restored antique motorcycles, etc. He insisted on stripping any new replacement steel panel down to bare metal and starting over, claimed that the manufacturers sprayed primer on any panel that was greasy, oily, etc and sold it as a replacement rather than clean it up to use on a production vehicle. Said he'd had too many repair jobs come back because of it.

 

one of my dads buddies used to work at ford back in the 60's and 70's and he said you would be amazed at the damage some cars would receive going down the assembly line, as well as how many cars would come down the line with the wrong color door or fenders and have to be sent to the onsite shop for repainting...

 

Another Mustang-related article I read a few years ago showed a bunch of bare '05 Mustang body shells out in a yard, waiting to be scrapped. Mind you, this before the car was even available to the public. Seems as though if a body goes through the paint line once, and it has a flaw, they send it through again. If it fails inspection the second time, they figure it's not worth trying to save again, so they crush it. Hasn't Ford ever heard of ebay?

 

I heard that a bunch of the bodies you speak of were given to Ford racers. Don't know for sure...just what I heard through the grapevine.

 

I worked at a Ford agency body shop in the 70's and we did a lot of repairs to new cars. They had a policy, you could replace a bolt on panel and sell it as new but you could not cut and weld a new panel on. Bullit holes from the train was commen, I think thats what you have. My guess is they put on a new door shell but fixed the 1/4.
We had a bunch of new cars come in heavy damaged from a derailed train. We put on new doors, fenders and such but they made us jack the roofs and 1/4s and pack it with bondo so they could sell the cars as "new". I thought it was a crime!