Brian just the thought of that is thrilling ... I mean chilling. Even the legendary Dale Smith who I met in Mn last summer commented that Dave was already an established figure at Olds by the time he arrived. Them's some ancient lobes.
Dave : Moving to the present did Olds use the same convention as Buick for the date of Mfg on the cowl tags? If it is 07D for a 66 442 I assume that means the 4th week of July 1966. If so, it must have been one of the last made. Also did GM cold turkey the 66 production on July 31, 66 and on August 1, 66 start making the 67 cars? I doubt it could have been that clean of a cut. Did they run some overlap between model years? I would think the plant would have to shut down a week or so for retooling. If so, when did that occur?
Can't answer that one for sure, Jim. Don't know much about the body tags. Cars were built differently at the BOP plants than at Lansing. At Lansing (also at Pontiac/Pontiac and Buick/Flint) Fisher body built the cars in their own plant and shipped them over to the assembly plants where they went into large "body float" areas. At the BOP plants, the Fisher plant and the Assembly plants are connected and it's a paper transfer between the two. Many differences in the way the cars were processed at that point. I can't recall whether your car is a Lansing built car or not, I do know it spent most of its early life in Georgia and came up to Michigan in the late 80's, early 90's. Does it have an M in the VIN? If not, usually the BOP plants would delay theitr launches until after we got going at the home plants to iron out part, equipment, and process issues. We always had a shutdown period between model runs at the assembly lines. They were always a minimum of 2 weeks and could be as much as 4 to 6 weeks. They didn't necessarily coincide with the shutdown periods at the Fisher plants and could be off as much as a month at year end (or beginning). The duration of these shutdowns varied with the extent of the changes for the new year, inventory levels at the dealers of leftovers, brick and mortar changes to the facilities, sourcing changes for components, line rearranges, and general maintenance on the plant and equipment. Also affecting this was whether or not it was a contract year and the possibility of a long strike right after launch. All of that came together in Fall, 1970 when GM had the 56 day strike. Sorry, long answer again.
Caddy was the only car division that wasn't built in the BOP (later GMAD) plants back then. All would be consistent. Chevy didn't have a home assembly plant (like the other 4 divisions), so they probably are consistent from plant to plant. Most procedures and practices like this are consistent across all car divisions, but don't read too much into it. Assembly plants had a whole different set of variables to deal with than the 3 home plants and the cars themselves can be very different. The dates on the Fisher body tag are the body only, and don't reflect when the car was assembled and came off the line.
What is the general range of total ignition timing degrees that can be safely run on a pump gas, street driven 400E Olds?
