Had a 70 340 car, X on one side J the other. Factory didn't seem to care about it.
No, they couldn't... If the head is within spec, they run it...
It's too hard to coordinate castings on both sides of the assembly line, they put on whatever fits... When you are running production lines, you have to throw them together as fast as you can... Especially with an engine factory that supplies multiple car plants... To quote a paint manager at Warren Truck, "I don't have time to finger f*ck every truck that goes through my shop... I have to do my best with the time I have with them on the line"...
It's too hard to track and separate castings in a factory... There are many issues to deal with...
If one machine goes down on the machine line, they will shut down that machine to repair it and run the machines in front of it and rack off the parts at the station just before the down one and put them aside... Then when that station goes back up, they keep running the complete line using currently loaded parts at the front of the line... Then if a machine at the front of the line goes down, they will then take the parts from they racked off from the first down machine and load them back on the line after the new down machine to keep the line going and parts coming off... Now those castings will make it to the assembly line weeks or months after the other castings in that batch that made it first time through... Then you have reworked parts and teardown parts from engines that were defective and torn down and the parts recycled... It's not a simple it goes from the back of the plant to the front in one swoop, there are hiccups on the way through...
So the machine lines build up banks of extra parts to fill in when their machine line goes down so the assembly line can keep running...
This is what machine lines have to do to keep the assembly line running... YOU HAVE TO KEEP THE ASSEMBLY LINE RUNNING!!!
If the executive managers at HQ see your assembly numbers are not what they should be, they make a call to the component plant Plant Managers and demand answers. Then the plant managers in the component plants chew out the area managers of the assembly line and machine lines responsible for not making their daily numbers... The **** rolls downhill... The execs at HQ get reports for production numbers every day and keep an eye on them... Every plant, whether it is a component plant or assembly plant has its daily production target that they are expected to meet and have to answer to the corporate exec's every day if they are short...
And god help the component plant if they can't supply the assembly plants and shut them down... There will be hell to pay...
A typical car plant runs 70 cars per hour off their assembly line... That's a car coming off the line every 51.4 seconds... Now think about if the assembly line goes down/stops for 15 minutes... You are talking 18 cars short... Now let's say that each car is worth $30k, 30k x 18 = $540.000, that's half a million dollars in product that they are short now... And what if you are making trucks worth $70k or more, that's over one million dollars for 15 minutes of downtime... That is why you have to keep the production line running....
So there's not enough time and manpower to finger f*ck every head casting to both sides of the assembly line to make them match... You throw on whatever you have on that pallet on that side of the line that meets specifications...
