When these stamps were set up were they done singly or would they have had multiple units in sequence ready to go? If in advance, I would think it would have been easy to grab wrong one and get off sequence once in a while?

The engines were not going down the engine dress line in VIN order, so they were often changing the last 2 digits.
I'd have to see a picture of the pad to comment further....

That’s interesting Kurt. I know that John Z must have explained the process sequence of vin stamp on the engine & Trans. - but I can’t find it at the moment. What was the sequence? One station stamping engine & Trans by a single employee on the dress line with a single stamp?

My experience in production (not at Norwood) is that employees would “double up” by one person covering 2 jobs while the other employee took a break. If an employee just walked off and left his work totally omitted, it would bring rain from the foreman. When I was a foreman, another employee in the area (usually a relief or utility man) would jump in & let me know right away. Letting people “double up” on line jobs was never officially authorized, but it was recognized that it happened. If a foreman really clamped down and didn’t allow any of it, the line workers wouldn't automatically fill in for each other at start of shift if several employees were absent. The relief men and utility men were there at startup to help also, but on Monday mornings, if I didn’t allow any doubling up during the shift - the line would be a mess. One hand washed the other within reason.

The 1967 Corvettes have a series of consecutive VIN errors in the thousands position (four digits in) for about 50 cars.
This is an embedded error that has ONLY that digit ground and corrected. It's a very unusual error as they typically grind the entire VIN and make the correction. This error may have been found well after the stamp was hit and they did a quick fix.

One to two character switch at a time.

1967-April 1969 one gang Stamper at station.

April 1969 -- one gang stamper for Camaros one for Firebirds.

Repair stamper arrangement consisted of gang stamper stamps completely hand arranged, taped then held in place while the other guy struck the bar with the hammer.

We never used a grinder to fix a stamp; only the "x" stamp. (For one thing, there was not a grinder present; my recollection is that it was a requirement to use the stamp, so the repairs would be distinct from VINs ground off in the field).

Here's how it worked when I was the foreman in the brake area of the truck plant, where the VINs were stamped on the frame:

The VIN stamper was a large hydraulic "press" hanging from a tool rail and with the weight offset by a "balancer" (imagine a Harley-Davidson hanging from the ceiling that you are supposed to maneuver into position and press a button). It is supposed to index to the next digit automatically -but - if you mis hit or get out of sequence for some reason then you have to make a repair. Chevy and GMC have different VIN sequence numbers, requiring different stampers hanging there, so if the operator stamps a Chevy VIN on a GMC, for example, then not only is that particular truck wrong but you are out of sequence on every truck after that.

The assembly line repair person and/or the "quality man" (the foreman's right hand man) follow the vehicles down the line with an "X" stamp and a 5 lb hammer and correct the VIN sequence number as required.

Usually it's not just one truck. It normally takes several trucks before somebody notices, so you'll have five or six trucks that have to be fixed - all without the line stopping - so it's quite a scramble for a few minutes while you figure out what went wrong and what has to happen to make it right. You pray nothing else goes to crap while you've got your two best guys otherwise unavailable.

I normally try to suppress any memories of that time.

K

This is absolutely correct.

I had 27 or so production operations with about 35 hourly employees. I could do every one of those jobs, and could do more than one for a short period of time, so if things were really (really!) desperate I could hop on and keep the line going.

I do not recall stopping the line myself in 40 years, even though it was pretty lonely at 5:55 am. Often it was me, my quality man and a couple of your "good" guys waiting around with me wringing my hands. When the line started at 6am it would chug about one job length and stop (somebody else would have pulled the cord because they were short staffed). Usually while everybody was getting situated I'd see the rest of my guys quick stepping down the aisle, tying their aprons on and catching up.

By the time the line started back up my guys had done the vehicle they missed, the one directly in front of them, plus one more, and were sitting on their stool reading the newspaper.

This was in the late 1970's/early 80's and I would have been about 19 or 20 years old at the time.

K

My '73 SD455 is double stamped. My recently purchased '70 trans Am does not have a vin stamp but appears original to the car.

Uh oh. You guys have opened the floodgates of memories now....

...but I don't want to hijack here.

So here's a link about breaks and relief men ("mass relief" vs "tag relief") , post #110:

https://67-72chevytrucks.com/vboard/...ef#post7317733

The other thing I just remembered is that we would "trade" operators in order to get the line going; so if I had a couple extra then I would loan them out to a guy that needed a couple.

If the operator was not trained for the temporary job he was about to do, then we would put two guys on that job. Since it would normally take them about ten minutes to learn the job then that was fertile ground for them to double up and work any deal they wanted for the rest of the day.

If it was a trained utility man or relief man placed on the job then he would have to do that job by himself.

I will say the foreman would normally reserve his best people for the toughest/most critical jobs, and then cover the lesser jobs with more expendable folk.

K

UAW 674 was the meanest union in the entire auto industry. "Doubling Up" as it was called would get you on the wrong side of the UNION real fast.

This was because of the adversarial relationship that existed on the lines in the late 1960's that intensified through to the longest strike in GM history at Norwood in 1972.

Every time it was tried by supervision the union said no-- DLA's were threatened by Management and the Union simply filed grievances against supervision and then organized work slow downs which created havoc in AGR and also in the exterior repair lots.

By 1970 for three shifting there were a massive number of ARO's in plant on the Chassis side alone and they gamed the system by "getting lost" on the job meaning foremen could not find them when needed and there was competition between supervisors for ARO's to support individual sections.