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1969 production color numbers

jww69rrpost

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9th Post

None of the SuperBirds are completed cars, for they are all missing their nose cone assembly and wing. These cars were driven onto semi-trailer car haulers for the five mile trip to the Clairpointe Pre-Production facility. Its purpose needs to be explained before we complete assembly of our car there. Its usual function was a training area for assembly of the next-year's models. It was complete with scaled down versions of every major area of an assembly plant, so that the new parts and new technologies could be tried under actual conditions before the "real" cars were assembled. (Clairpointe test cars completed are "pilot cars"). For example, in May of 1969, perhaps twenty of the soon-to-be-introduced E-bodies were completely built at Clairpointe. In late 1969, this facility was not in use because the 1970 models were already in full production (since August 1, 1969), and the 1971 model pilot assembly had not begun. Therefore, it was ideally suited for SuperBird final assembly; its close proximity to Lynch Road was an added bonus.

There actually was little assembly required when the cars arrived in no particular order from Lynch Road. The first car to arrive was RM23?0A149789, on October 17, 1969. It was completed and shipped out the same day. The last car to arrive was RM23U0A172609, which arrived on December 17, 1969, and was completed the next day. (SuperBird VINs themselves range from 149597 to 181274). Several cars were returned to Lynch Road for repairs, which must have meant major parts were wrong, such as a 1970 Road Runner front end mistakenly attached, or the car was seriously damaged in transit. Clairpointe normally could repair normal parts malfunctions itself.

Nose cones were received from Creative Industries fully assembled. All internal nose parts (except hardware) and the interior surfaces of the shell itself had been individually sprayed flat black over bare metal before any assembly. The outer surface of the nose shell was painted with light grey primer, before assembly of internal parts.

Almost all internal structural parts of SuperBird noses were borrowed from the Charger Daytona nose. Despite countless press articles about these cars, the only fiberglass parts of the nose cones were the headlight doors, which do interchange between Dodge and Plymouth. Both cars used the complete 1968-69 Charger vacuum headlight system. SuperBirds used nose parking lamps from the 1970 Fury (clear lens version). Both winged cars used the same small nose cone spoiler, the exact design of which merited more time than any other special part, due to cooling worries. The SuperBird's inward tilted wing uprights result in superior air flow compared to the Daytona's straight uprights. However, the SuperBird's compromised rear window area resulted in an overall slower car.

The primary Clairpointe concern with the nose cones was correct operation of the headlight doors, and proper parking lamp mounting. Precise federal safety rules had to be strictly followed after approval for these designs had been obtained.

Wings and noses were painted in lacquer before installation on the car. The Clairpointe baking oven could not be used to bake enamel paint because the nose cones had to be fully assembled before color-coating. Sometimes the lacquer-colored nose and wing did not precisely match the enamel-colored body of the car! The nose spoiler was painted body color while off the nose.

All of the decorative decals on the car were installed at Clairpointe. The assembly guidebook prescribes these combinations concerning the wing decals and the "Plymouth" quarter panel lettering:

White decals: EB5-EV2-999
Black decals: EW1-EK2-FY1-FJ5

The nose decals were always matt black, using DiNoc material (slightly textured). Only the left headlight door received a miniature version of a wing decal.

The final items installed on the SuperBird were the trunk-mounted front frame rail jack and handle, special jack instruction decal under the deck lid, the loose-shipped nose spoiler, license plate bracket, and the cardboard template to mount it. For those states requiring front plates, it was to be mounted on top of the nose shell, between the headlight doors!

Perhaps a postscript is justified here. While about one-half of the approximately two-thousand SuperBirds found immediate buyers, many of the remainder were almost unsellable. It was possible to buy a dealer-new SuperBird in some locations two or more years after their production. Many were converted into Road Runners by weary dealers. Some of this sad problem was undoubtedly due to the limited demand for so impractical a car. But in large part it was due to insurance rates so expensive that some companies instructed their agents to "write for a quotation."

Selling SuperBirds proved to be of little difficulty for performance-wise dealers, however. First Avenue Plymouth, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sold fifteen, more than any other dealer.

BROADCAST SHEET NOTE: In our tour of Lynch Road, we encountered broadcast sheets from at least every major area of production. There was no legal reason to include with the completed car any of the sheets. In fact, in later years they were actively eliminated because the paper was not in compliance with government standards of cloth fire resistance.

 

jww69rrpost

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10th Post

LYNCH ROAD TODAY: By leveling the Hamtramck Plant, then leaving Lynch Road, Chrysler ceased to build cars in Detroit itself. City government pressured Chrysler to sell Lynch Road to the city for one dollar in about 1984, as compensation for large employee layoffs. Today, the plant still stands, and is used by several small businesses and city government for storage and light manufacturing.
There is another area of the Chassis Line whose work is now installed on the car, the Tire and Wheel section. This area is elevated above the main floor of the plant. It also has a broadcast teletype printer. Responsibilities here include providing the Trim Line with mounted, matching, correct sets of tires, with the correct style of wheels. Tires are mounted on wheels with an automatic, high speed machine. It blows the correct amount of air into the tire very quickly between the bead and rim just before mounting is complete. Balancing follows.

Ready sets of four tires, plus the correct spare, are dropped down metal tubes to each side of the Trim Line installation point. Assembly line boredom combined with the desire for efficiency apparently has motivated workers here to learn how to land the spare tire of each and every car with one bounce into the trunk! They will find this trick tougher on the SuperBird; its deck lid opens a limited amount, to prevent it from hitting the fastback panel.

Once all the underneath work is done on the car, it drops onto a "flat top" moving assembly line, which resembles the tracks of a bulldozer. The car now sits on its own mounted wheels and tires, but it is guided along the line by the flat top. The front end is sitting very low because the torsion bars have not yet been adjusted. This allows easier engine compartment access.

Instrument panel sub-assembly is in a remote area of Lynch Road, and requires its own broadcast sheet. Whether a car will have air conditioning makes a big difference to instrument panel parts selection. Nearly each of the car's electrical options has an instrument panel control or light, all of which must be installed, together with the correct instrument cluster, all of the panel wiring, and the crash pad.
Another sub-assembly area of the plant Bondurites and color-coats the small, Lynch Road-made metal items like the instrument panel frame. This "Small Parts Painting Department" has its own broadcast sheet for parts selection and preparation. After Bonduriting, the small parts are not primered. Rather, they are color-coated electrostatically. An instrument panel frame is connected electrically to one polarity, while the paint gun and its paint is of the opposite polarity. Good paint adhesion results, but more important is the even coverage and paint savings.

Completed instrument panels are sent according to Sequence Number by overhead hooks to their installation point on the Trim Line. Sometimes a highlighted broadcast sheet is taped to the glovebox or is stuffed above it by the Instrument Panel Department workers. These sheets may remain in place on the instrument panel when the car leaves the factory.

On the Trim Line, the heater/air conditioner has already been attached to the dashpanel. All body wiring, lights, and electrical equipment is installed. The radiator, and all the drive line fluids are added from overhead-mounted hoses. By now we have reached the rear of the plant after traveling through the many turns of the Trim Line.

We now have a car that will run and drive. A worker carrying a simple wooden seat (hand-upholstered with scrap foam!) walks to our waiting SuperBird, places the seat on the driver's side floor, starts the engine, and drives off!

He is not going far, only to another part of the Trim/Chassis Department, called the "Rolls." Here are floor-mounted rollers onto which the car's rear wheels are driven. This allows considerable driveline testing, as well as providing a complete electrical check under a variety of running conditions. The object of this testing is to detect any noises, vibrations, leaks, shorts, or outright failures. If such are discovered, repair holes, manned by line workers with seniority, are able to fix any problem from minor to disastrous. Cars are never scrapped as being "unfixable" or "not worth fixing."

When roller testing and any repairs are completed, the car is driven another short distance in the plant, to the Final Line stage of assembly. This is the longest line of all, being 1980' in length, extending straight to the front of the plant.

Final Line work concentrates on body trim and the interior. An early task is installation of the headliner. For our sample SuperBird, it is a special-cut piece due to the added rear window area, and it is always black whether the remainder of the interior is black or white. (This is a singular exception to color coordination).

Next installed are the door latches, window seals, window regulators, and the glass. Before any upholstery is installed, every car passes through a water leak test booth, which is the length of three cars. Highly-pressured water is directed at the top, bottom, and sides of the car as it travels through the dark booth. An inspector riding inside the car looks for leaks, using a flashlight, and notes any problems on a heavy paper inspection form.

Charge-up of the air conditioning system is done on the Final Line. Four cars at a time can be charged, which is all automatically done. Each car is hooked to an overhead rail-mounted charging system, which is pulled along by the car itself as it travels down the line.

Upholstery panels for the doors and quarters, and the seat fabric and foam, are supplied by a Chrysler subsidiary, or by an outside vendor. Lynch Road assembles to the seat frame and spring assembly the padding and upholstery in a remote sub-assembly area. Here is yet another broadcast sheet printer. Often, this area's sheet is inserted behind the springs of the rear seat vertical cushion before the group of seats for that car is hooked to the Final Line installation area. The front seat(s) are covered with clear plastic.

 

jww69rrpost

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11th and Final Post

Much of the length of Final Line has a center pit for under-car installation and adjustment. A major task is complete alignment of the front steering and suspension. There are many small tasks done on Final Line, such as installation of the air cleaner, window chrome trim, some mouldings-emblems-stripes, and all of the many instructional and legally required small decals, dispensed from overhead rolls. Several owner/operator instruction tags are attached to the driver's controls. The plastic-wrapped bumper jack is installed in the trunk and cars with standard-type wheels have their hubcaps placed in the trunk. The headlights are aimed with special instruments.

When a car reaches the end of the main part of the Final Line, and it requires minor optional items, the car goes onto short "repair" lines running the narrow direction of the plant, crosswise of the Final Line. This is the Car Conditioning Area. Here some of the decorative stripes, and painted-on stripes are applied. Any final repairs are made. A car that has randomly been selected for a full-car inspection may spend time here if anything was found amiss. This inspection will be evidenced by many more inspector's stamps and markings than found on the usual car, which will have received an inspection only at the end of each department through which it passes.

A very late, final sequencing task is application of the car's VIN-imprinted Monroney Label to the rear of the driver's door. As the car goes out the Lynch Road door, the final operation is spray-on protective waxing.

None of the SuperBirds are completed cars, for they are all missing their nose cone assembly and wing. These cars were driven onto semi-trailer car haulers for the five mile trip to the Clairpointe Pre-Production facility. Its purpose needs to be explained before we complete assembly of our car there. Its usual function was a training area for assembly of the next-year's models. It was complete with scaled down versions of every major area of an assembly plant, so that the new parts and new technologies could be tried under actual conditions before the "real" cars were assembled. (Clairpointe test cars completed are "pilot cars"). For example, in May of 1969, perhaps twenty of the soon-to-be-introduced E-bodies were completely built at Clairpointe. In late 1969, this facility was not in use because the 1970 models were already in full production (since August 1, 1969), and the 1971 model pilot assembly had not begun. Therefore, it was ideally suited for SuperBird final assembly; its close proximity to Lynch Road was an added bonus.

There actually was little assembly required when the cars arrived in no particular order from Lynch Road. The first car to arrive was RM23?0A149789, on October 17, 1969. It was completed and shipped out the same day. The last car to arrive was RM23U0A172609, which arrived on December 17, 1969, and was completed the next day. (SuperBird VINs themselves range from 149597 to 181274). Several cars were returned to Lynch Road for repairs, which must have meant major parts were wrong, such as a 1970 Road Runner front end mistakenly attached, or the car was seriously damaged in transit. Clairpointe normally could repair normal parts malfunctions itself.

Nose cones were received from Creative Industries fully assembled. All internal nose parts (except hardware) and the interior surfaces of the shell itself had been individually sprayed flat black over bare metal before any assembly. The outer surface of the nose shell was painted with light grey primer, before assembly of internal parts.

Almost all internal structural parts of SuperBird noses were borrowed from the Charger Daytona nose. Despite countless press articles about these cars, the only fiberglass parts of the nose cones were the headlight doors, which do interchange between Dodge and Plymouth. Both cars used the complete 1968-69 Charger vacuum headlight system. SuperBirds used nose parking lamps from the 1970 Fury (clear lens version). Both winged cars used the same small nose cone spoiler, the exact design of which merited more time than any other special part, due to cooling worries. The SuperBird's inward tilted wing uprights result in superior air flow compared to the Daytona's straight uprights. However, the SuperBird's compromised rear window area resulted in an overall slower car.

The primary Clairpointe concern with the nose cones was correct operation of the headlight doors, and proper parking lamp mounting. Precise federal safety rules had to be strictly followed after approval for these designs had been obtained.

Wings and noses were painted in lacquer before installation on the car. The Clairpointe baking oven could not be used to bake enamel paint because the nose cones had to be fully assembled before color-coating. Sometimes the lacquer-colored nose and wing did not precisely match the enamel-colored body of the car! The nose spoiler was painted body color while off the nose.

All of the decorative decals on the car were installed at Clairpointe. The assembly guidebook prescribes these combinations concerning the wing decals and the "Plymouth" quarter panel lettering:

White decals: EB5-EV2-999
Black decals: EW1-EK2-FY1-FJ5

The nose decals were always matt black, using DiNoc material (slightly textured). Only the left headlight door received a miniature version of a wing decal.

The final items installed on the SuperBird were the trunk-mounted front frame rail jack and handle, special jack instruction decal under the deck lid, the loose-shipped nose spoiler, license plate bracket, and the cardboard template to mount it. For those states requiring front plates, it was to be mounted on top of the nose shell, between the headlight doors!

Perhaps a postscript is justified here. While about one-half of the approximately two-thousand SuperBirds found immediate buyers, many of the remainder were almost unsellable. It was possible to buy a dealer-new SuperBird in some locations two or more years after their production. Many were converted into Road Runners by weary dealers. Some of this sad problem was undoubtedly due to the limited demand for so impractical a car. But in large part it was due to insurance rates so expensive that some companies instructed their agents to "write for a quotation."

Selling SuperBirds proved to be of little difficulty for performance-wise dealers, however. First Avenue Plymouth, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sold fifteen, more than any other dealer.

BROADCAST SHEET NOTE: In our tour of Lynch Road, we encountered broadcast sheets from at least every major area of production. There was no legal reason to include with the completed car any of the sheets. In fact, in later years they were actively eliminated because the paper was not in compliance with government standards of cloth fire resistance.

LYNCH ROAD TODAY: By leveling the Hamtramck Plant, then leaving Lynch Road, Chrysler ceased to build cars in Detroit itself. City government pressured Chrysler to sell Lynch Road to the city for one dollar in about 1984, as compensation for large employee layoffs. Today, the plant still stands, and is used by several small businesses and city government for storage and light manufacturing.

RESEARCH ASSISTANCE: Galen Govier, Nigel Mills, and Jim Radke provided valuable knowledge based on their many years of Chrysler product research.

RESEARCH ASSISTANCE: Galen Govier, Nigel Mills, and Jim Radke provided valuable knowledge based on their many years of Chrysler product research.
 
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