Factory assembly manual

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SClassic

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It's amazing the stuff you can turn up at a swap meet. My ex has 1 for her 68 camero and I wanted to find 1 for my truck and low and behold I found it at swap meet. I don't have a computer and right now I can't afford to make copies of all 1600 hundred pages but as soon as I can find a cheapest route to get copies or a disk made I will get one of your addresses and mail a copies or disk so you can put it up on the library here.
 

Keith Seymore

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Dude, those are the original design blueprints.

Notice the revisions, removals and assembly notes - even shows the approval signatures of the engineers.
Since this has come back up - I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about the Assembly Manual.

These are not the original design blueprints themselves but certainly descended from the design "layout" drawings. The layouts themselves were huge, like as big as a drafting table, and rolled up and stored in little cubby holes in the engineering facilities scattered throughout Southeast Michigan (now we can access them through our laptop, without leaving our desk).

The layouts would spawn the individual detail part drawings, so that parts could be made at the various suppliers, but also would flow down to the Assembly Manual group.

This group was a collection of talented artists, who would take the design information and distill it down into the individual sheets, along with the "cartoon" showing the area of interest and design information.

The sheets were distributed to the various assembly plants at the beginning of the model year in the form of a collection of three ring binders; like - five or six big binders with sections in each book. The books were divided by UPC (0, 1, 2, etc up through 15). The various UPCs represented different areas of the vehicle (ie, 5 = brakes, 6 = engine, 7 = trans, 10 = tire/wheel). A good engineering specifications guy could find what he was looking for pretty quickly based on that knowledge.

As updates were made to the vehicle design new individual sheets would be sent out. The original sheet would be pulled and discarded and replaced by the updated sheet.

There were several complete sets within each assembly plant. The inspection or production office in the cab shop would get a set, along with complete set in the front end sheet metal area, trim area, the chassis line and the final line inspection/production office would get a set. If there was a question the foreman (or his right hand hourly guy, the "quality man") would go to the office and look up the needed information (not the hourly line worker/assembler himself). In addition to torques and part numbers the pages would show interim routings and placement of wires and piping and cables, so that the items could be staged to end up in the right spot during final assembly.

At the end of the model year the whole set would be thrown out and a new set distributed to start over. That's why they are so rare (or incomplete) now: they were never intended to be released to the public. I have personally thrown away more than I care to admit. It never occurred to me to keep a set, even being the consummate car guy. Any sets or sections that exist today are because somebody had the foresight to squirrel it away and smuggle it out.

The assembly manual is still in use today, referred to as "PAD sheets" (Product Assembly document) or "the "PDM" (Product Description Manual) and are accessed electronically rather than via hard copy.

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hip2bsquare

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keith, thank you! as always for your very knowledgeable insight & help. it would be great if GM or (someone from GM - past/present) would be able find and recreate the pads/pdms as a PDF/disk format so that restorers could utilize or recreate original models and for us who are just repairing these..... thanks again!!
 

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