Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith Seymore
Well - by way of clarification:
1 - No speculation here; I wrote a few of those notations myself.
2 - None of those are the VIN proper, or the sequential portion of the VIN.
Any serialized information would be the build sequence number. Nobody cares about the VIN in the assembly plant (other than to get the VIN tag on the right truck, just like an emissions label, SPID, or Mulroney window label).
K
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I always enjoy reading these posts about all the grease pen markings that are found. People don’t realize for the most part these are not important. It’s more of a “confirmation” thing for your fellow associates online when it traveled down the assembly line. Since I worked at an auto assembly plant, we used grease pens or paint pens for a lot of different things. They frowned on using them for anything outside the purpose they were meant for.
Like one time there was a guy that was installing gas tanks. During some downtime we was using his paint pen to draw a little bumblebee on the fuel tank. It was actually facing the body so it would never be seen again, UNTIL the car needed a repair done while it was still in the factory. The gas tank needed removed and they saw the bumblebee. They were able to trace it back to the guy that was on that job at the time because of the records that were documented. When a certain person was doing that job, we would use our clock numbers. Poor guy got fired over it. They found out he had been doing this for awhile, lol.
So out there in the mass of vehicles that were made during my 30 years of working at the assembly plant, my clock number is most likely on several vehicles out there. Along with other grease pen marking I made. My last 5 years I was in the Vehicle Quality Dept, so I used my grease a lot! We used them to circle defects in the paint, or circle little deforms that we would find. It made it easier for the repair person to see what I saw, and it would get fixed before leaving the plant.