Car show elitists

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I remember the foreman of the touch up shop at Pagewood buying his wife a Kingswood out of the company fleet.He took it into the shop, gathered his leading hands around him and told them it was his wife's new car and to tell him when they had it ready. Best finished Kingswood you ever saw when it went out the gate. I had to turn a blind eye to the Premier trim, weathershields, sun visor, etc, etc, etc that had miraculously grown attached to it (and the LS diff).

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Along the same lines the Production Manager at Brisbane Plant had a nice Bronze Wine XA Fairmont with beige vinyl roof.
During the Brisbane floods in 1974 He had it parked on a hill at Chelmer where he lived. The flood peak rose so much that the car was completely submerged and a speedboat ran over the top of it doing a lot of damage to the turret.

Duncan Norris the Plant manager approved the complete rebuild of the car, and it emerged a new one completely refitted with new trim, electrics,engine trans etc etc.but with the same tags.

I am not aware of staff cars being specially built, as Don Deveson ran a tight ship at Broadmeadows, but I did learn of some guys in Brisbane throwing components over the back fence. When I was building thousands of cars to BOS ( branch Order Stock) I would always build a couple to specs that I liked on the chance that there would be a fleet turnover.
I had a nice little red Escort 2 door 2litre with rallye pack and sports suspension built, but I only had it a short time.

Don had an endearing habit of driving his Falcon hardtop down between the lines at high speed on the weekend and woe betide the plant operators who didn't leave clear corridors. His hardtop had a 428 CJ which the Detroit guys fitted to a hardtop which went there for styling evaluation.

Regards Philip A

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Originally Posted by Tank

If you raced a HQ around Bathust it would be ready for the scrap bin about halfway through the race, even the earlier 2 door Monaros were popping windscreens and splitting the passenger footwell floor.
Mate, my old mans HQ popped a windscreen and cracked it with a 10ft. tinny on the roofracks at 60klms/h, what was it 4 bolts in the subframe and the front guard bolts held the whole front end on, try unbolting the guards with the front jacked up, there was no way Holden could have bodged up a HQ to race at Bathurst (or anywhere else) and got it past scrutiny, Regards Frank.

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Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

All modifications necessary to make a race car would have been homologated with CAMS by building and selling 200 or more. We are talking factory involvement not a single race car put together by a privateer. Big difference as far as engineering, design, manufacture, and budget.

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Do you remember the GTS Monaro at bathurst in 1977, I think the Morris Marina Sport finished before it in outright placings:Rolling::Rolling::Rolling:

And I'm pretty sure the HO option was only available in the GT Falcon Bathurst race car and not in the road version.

Baz.

We used to schedule a fair mix of cars for plant stock, but mostly the very popular specs like Kingswood, 202, auto, discs, white, conservative trim colour. The ones that went out the gate trailer load after trailer load every day. The idea was to have a reasonable range on hand for dealers to choose, particularly the smaller ones without the sales volume or financial capacity to carry much stock. Some large metro dealers would have 700 or more vehicles in stock. Some country dealers had none.

Getting your staff order car seam welded and anti-rust dipped three or four times could be done but needed a deal of co-operation from production as the shell had to come off-line to rectification area for the welding and then put back on in the right place and the dipping required a bit of finesse in line management to squeeze the shell off-line, dip it again, and eventually get it back in the right sequence.

I can't imagine rectifying a flooded or badly damaged car at Pagewood. We had more company fleet vehicles than we knew what to do with. Rule was to sell them at three months/2000 miles. Some had only a few hundred miles on. The Plant Controller was entitled to a Statesman de Ville with all the bells and whistles. He lived less than two miles away and one of his cars was once sold at 94 miles.

Theft was pretty well under control and generally at a petty level. Occasionally something like a crate of alternators would disappear. This was usually done by the connivance of a worker, a truckie, and the right opportunity. Only two cars disappeared complete from Pagewood. One was hoisted over the side fence along the golf club with a mobile crane, and a HD disappeared from outside storage at the Sydney Showgrounds.

People were regularly caught trying to smuggle parts out the gate and police were always called immediately and the person was sacked on the spot.

Staff who bought cars either new or ex company fleet were obliged to keep them for 12 months. Random inspection of registration papers occurred to see if the car was still in the buyers name. Several sales staff got sacked for buying ex-company fleet HQ SS, which was supposed to be a marketing one-off. We put a swag of them in the fleet for the reps to take around all their dealers and use as demos. The dealers took heaps of orders and we were out of stock. Several sales people got their heads together and bought cars and promptly sold them to dealers. Somehow security got wind of this and went through them like the proverbial packet of salts. A couple of the sackings were high level at the state sales office.

Aah! GMH Pagewood plant ;) well, the police didn't have to travel far in the late 60' early 70's in the HK/T/G era as there was usually a paddy wagon and often an ambulance parked at the front gate during night shift :( seems that personal and production management couldn't quite come to terms with ethnic diversity/hatred, and put differing nationalities either together or close together on the winding line ;) (was offered a job as a charge hand on night shift after the other bloke was stabbed trying to break up a fight, the qualifications were, speak, read and write english) body undercoating area from memory, way better money than Zetland :) but I valued my health and my social/motorcycling life ;)



cheers

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Originally Posted by UncleHo

Aah! GMH Pagewood plant ;) well, the police didn't have to travel far in the late 60' early 70's in the HK/T/G era as there was usually a paddy wagon and often an ambulance parked at the front gate during night shift :( seems that personal and production management couldn't quite come to terms with ethnic diversity/hatred, and put differing nationalities either together or close together on the winding line ;) (was offered a job as a charge hand on night shift after the other bloke was stabbed trying to break up a fight, the qualifications were, speak, read and write english) body undercoating area from memory, way better money than Zetland :) but I valued my health and my social/motorcycling life ;)



cheers

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Jaysus, Uncle. The pay must have been bloody crook at Zetland. Assemblers at GM-H were lowly paid. The only ethnic problems I can recall were between Croats and Serbs and generally on an individual basis. Same system as used on the Snowy, mix them up rather than have groups of all the same ethnicity/religion opposing groups of their traditional enemy.

Getting workers for overtime required a bit of finesse, particularly weekends. The Italians would be busy building the blocka da flat, the Greeks working the family coffee shop/snack bar/ chippy, the Lebanese driving the family taxis. Poms, Egyptians and Yugos would work OT until the cows came home. Although a goodly number of Yugos went straight from GM to work a short night shift at Kellog's, Botany.

The coppers used to park in the front entry whilst they were bludging grog and tucker from the Pagewood pub and the Kentucky Duck across the intersection.

Ford had a riot in 1975 where among other things they tried to break into the computer room at Broadmeadows to disable it.

I recall that they were stirred up by English communist Trade unionists who had emigrated because they were blacklisted in UK.

I recall one of the problems we had was between Vietnamese and Turks , who for some reason hated each other. It must have been very early days for the Vietnamese. Maybe the Turks saw them as taking their jobs.

Just on the Ethnic front, I remember in Brisbane plant we had a sudden influx of Torres Straight Islanders. They were willing to work in the lead load area, which was the worst part of car assembly (and is just about gone now with consumer acceptance of join marks hidden by plastic strips). Anyway one day Immigration paid a visit and out of I think 70 only 6 were Australian. The plant had to close for a couple of days while we scraped up some lead load workers.
Regards Philip A

bigjohn.

It's this

Nice. I know a bloke in Alice Springs with one :D(the Disco II TD5 is her car :eek:). He reckons it is great... I don't fit in it :mad:.

There has to be some advantage to being a short arse:o

Not neck breakingly quick off the line but it handles like a dream and when the twisty bit speed limit is 80kmh , generally you can keep doing 80kmh through the corners :D

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Originally Posted by PhilipA

Just on the Ethnic front, I remember in Brisbane plant we had a sudden influx of Torres Straight Islanders. They were willing to work in the lead load area, which was the worst part of car assembly (and is just about gone now with consumer acceptance of join marks hidden by plastic strips). Anyway one day Immigration paid a visit and out of I think 70 only 6 were Australian. The plant had to close for a couple of days while we scraped up some lead load workers.
Regards Philip A

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We could not use certain Mediterranean ethnic groups in the lead fill and solder discing stations. They were alleged to have a genetic sensitivity to lead in excess of the norm. Most new assemblers started in the body shop particularly on spot welding stations and North Europeans on lead. If they stuck with the company then they got better jobs. There was a hell of a turnover in line labour. Blokes would arrive from overseas or the bush, or just out of gaol and need some work to get started again, rent a flat etc. and then work there for as long as it took to get a bit of a purse or a better job.

Personnel had a permanent ad every day in the Daily Telegraph for assemblers.

I was told that in the early 50's labour was so hard to find that personnel people used to meet the migrant ships as they tied up and spread the word about a job available right now.