VIN vs. build date...do these add up?

[sdkar]

Okay, I was just surfing around ebay for the heck of it looking at Pace Car stuff. 

I found one Pace Car that is in really rough shape but looks all original with a build date of 04C and a VIN of 627765
ebay # 230005425510

Another Pace Car had a build date of 03E and a VIN of 627047.
ebay # 110006584976

My Pace Car has a build date of 04C and a VIN of 636285.

If these numbers are all correct, then from the last few days in March until sometime in the 3rd week of April (over 3 weeks time), only 718 cars were built.  However sometime near the end of the 3rd week of April (within 7 days) 8520 cars were made.  This does not add up.  Any explanations?

Steve Karlecke, J.D.
69 Camaro Pace Car
69 Camaro Pro-Tour

[william]

The dates & VIN ranges you have posted square with data I have had for over 20 years. At Norwood there was no 03A, 03C, 04A, 04B. There was an interruption in output there for some reason. Having worked in manufacturing my entire career I know that for a plant dedicated to a specific product all it is takes an outage of one component to shut it down.

The range of VINs for 02A is N602xxx-N615xxx, over 12,000 units. Probably depleted stock of everything.

[ccargo]

I've noticed a ton of 03D, 03E, and 04C 69 pace cars. How do we account for a GM production shutdown/slowdown with 30,000 vin units being produced during the 04C build week? Could the trouble have been on the Fisher side since thats where the cowl tags were given body build dates? GM would just keep on assigning vin numbers to the backed up orders regardless of the cowl tag build date 

[william]

Huh?

The VIN range for 04C is N6366xx-N6277xx, about 8900 units.

[ccargo]

Sorry...poorly worded. Let me try again. Norwood produced nearly 30,000 units combined between March and April production when they were shutdown four weeks out of those nine production weeks. At first I was a confused how they were able to maintain that many units at half production when those months present themselves as higher than average production periods. But now I see from your response that they were able to push 12,000 units out during the week of 02A averaging around 1,000 units per shift? Up untill now I thought production was fairly static but it appears that it ranged from 12,000 units in a week i.e. 02A and 5190 units during the entire month of July?  Talk about feast or famine, I'm not in production myself but am a supplier to manufacturing facilities and I dont think they could ride that kind of a roller coaster today.

[JohnZ]

There was no "roller-coaster" - Norwood built 912 units per day (on two shifts), barring shift cancellations; there was no day-to-day change in the actual line rate per hour. The ramifications of a line rate change in an assembly plant are a nightmare, as it changes every operation in the plant, and Norwood's maximum rated capacity was 57 units per hour - you don't increase that without expanding the plant.

[ccargo]

OK, so back to my previous comment regarding an irregularity or problem on the Fisher side of production. Could Fisher Body have been the culprit of the missing production weeks or would it make more sense that they just used the same week date code for more than one week of production? Or were they able to produce 12,000 bodies in a work week? I'm sorry if I'm confused it just seems odd to show such a fluctuation in production if we tie GM assigned vin #'s to Fisher build weeks. Maybe I'm just way over in left field picking daisies.

[JohnZ]

There are numerous anomalies in the assignment of build week codes on the Fisher Body trim tag; you can't always make arbitrary connections between build week codes and VIN numbers. Their build capacity was the same as the adjacent Chevrolet final assembly plant - 912 per day.