AMC ENGINE PAINT CONFUSION

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Thank you for clearing that up billd about Caravelle Blue - for once
and for all I hope.

However, as far as it being possible for paint
to run out - Larry Mitchell has a pretty good reputation as an AMC historian
and I have to say that I believed and still believe what he said about his
experience at the engine plant. He knows too many obscure details about that
event and others to be fabricating anything. He was sincere and honest in my estimation.
Add to that the fact that AMC's computers of the day were not the computers we
have become used to. That computer room would have been a room full of
mainframes and their use was not nearly as flexible, powerful or useful as even
a base model PC today. Plus there was no internet. Communications were crude by
today's standards. Photocopy machines were in their infancy having just evolved
from wooden trays with about a 1/2" of chemicals in them that you fed
special paper through to make copies one at a time.

Mis-communications between manufacturers and
suppliers were notoriously poor by today's standards and all sorts of fixes and
shenanigans were employed to keep the lines going. The word “backordered” was
in heavy use in those days. There was no such thing as just-in-time shipping
and calculations about how much of a given product to order was partly or
mostly based on human estimates, not computer projections the further into the
model year you went.

Not all of the model year's cars or engines of a
colour were built at the same time. The initial runs were done with colours
being applied to cars one after the other. After that, the colours were applied
to the shells according to customer order in the order the orders came in.
That's why you can't use the VIN to determine the sequence the car came down
the line. On a Machine it's the 'W' number on the bottom of the door tag that
determines order of production. The VIN's were numbered according to the order
of the documents sitting on someone's desk - the order in which the paperwork
was completed in other words.

AMC was notorious for poor to non-existent
record keeping. That is the single biggest reason there is so much confusion
about what was and was not original on our cars. No PC's meant most day to day
record keeping was done by hand and kept as hard copies much of it hand written.
Our build sheets in Machines are little scraps of paper with a hand written directive
– ‘Mach spec 059”. They were not real build sheets as other manufacturers knew
them. Most of the production standards were processes that were word of mouth. It
was not unheard of for cars to be built to order and then painted the wrong
colour and subsequently refused by the customer.

As for production standards, Rebel Machines are
a classic example. The Red, White and Blue cars were supposed to be built with
the first 1,000 in RWB before January 1970. But based on survival rates and
evidence from the Rebel Machine Registry run by Mickey Ziomkowski; that almost
certainly could not have happened. There are not enough pre-January 1 1970 cars
in the registry before the first solid colour cars were built when you compare
those numbers against the total known production. It was specifically noted in
the Press Kit that RWB cars could not and would not be produced with a vinyl
roof but we now know that one was and was butt ugly. It was also stated that
all Machines came with factory ram air and hood tach but we now know that one
Machine was delivered with a regular hood, no scoop, no tach, no pigtail to
hook up to a tach and no evidence that the wire harness had ever been tampered
with. The very first Machine used in all of the advertising shoots was
different in a multitude of ways from the production run and the very last
Rebel Machine built was hand built by the factory and it differed from the
production run in other ways. Throughout the run, there were all sorts of
verified anomalies. There were three production runs of the stripe kits. The
original art from the first run must have been lost because the second run of
stripes was quite different from the first and the third run corrected the
mistakes of the second and reverted back fairly faithfully to the original run.
The variation in interiors is adventure in production standards departures –
they weren’t common but they did exist – mostly because if it meant making a
sale, AMC was hot on the trail.

And there were all sorts of ways to put things together
and still be acceptable. Notably, the lever on the highback bucket seats could
go on two different ways. The correct way was with the tab above the pivot
screw. But many were installed upside down. You know they are upside down when
you stop to think about it because in this position they are difficult to operate
and they catch on the clothes of people entering and exiting the back seat. Plus
the correct position is shown in ‘the Mix for the Seventies from American
Motors’ on the 28^th (facing) page.

Another thing to remember was that if possible,
AMC sold its prototypes. None of the prototypes conformed to production
standards and as a result, some of the prototypes have affected restorations. So
then you have to ask yourself what exactly were the production standards?
Basically they were guidelines that everyone knew would be bent or broken in
certain cases when a sale was on the line. In those days, a departure from
standard did not cause system wide convulsions the way rigid manufacturing
practices do today. 

The other factor often overlooked is the effect strikes had on materials supply and there were plenty of strikes during that
model year. In those days, strikes were more common in the auto sector than
they are now and the disruptions were often debilitating. In the event of a
strike against a supplier, make do’s were the order of the day. Things didn’t
run anywhere nearly as smoothly back then as the rosy mists of the intervening
years seem to suggest. The 1970 Camaros didn’t appear until half way through
the 1970 model year due to a strike. All of the manufacturers had to contend
with severe supply problems that year.

As for product controls, AMC was the best of the
Big Four as they were known then. But even that was dismal by today’s
standards. Fit and finish on domestically produced cars of all types was rough
with the 1970 Corvette winning the Lemon of the Year Award from Seymore Balz of
Cars Magazine for fit and finish. If quality control hadn’t been such an issue,
Ralph Nader wouldn’t have had any ammunition. He took shots at AMC as well as
the rest of them. Plus AMC had some truly horrific production secrets that
eventually became a major factor in their being bought by Chrysler and ensured
that at some point, AMC was going to come to an ignominious end no matter what.

Anyway, the bottom line is that production
standards were followed most of the time but there were enough departures
without proper record keeping that ensured that future generations would of
necessity continue to scratch their head in frustration.