I have a 1970 Olds 442. I just changed the rear seat covers on it. When I removed the original seat cover, I found a partial build sheet between the cover & the padding.
The sheet was all torn into pieces. I can tell that it was torn up on assembly in 1970. The staining of it is different on each piece. What I don't understand is why would
GM do this. These cars were just cars back then. No one ever thought there would be collectors looking for paperwork. Why would they do this? Why wouldn't they
just throw out these papers, they were for factory assembly only. Plus, they're in such an inaccessible place no one could use them to check their work. I also found a complete
build sheet glued between the gas tank & the rubber insulator. I'm baffled. Any ideas?

 

Someone on the line was supposed to remove that, and throw it in the trash. Instead they hid it in the car because it saved them a few seconds of walking to the trash, which made their job easier

 

^^^THIS^^^

Our cars were manufactured before just-in-time inventory and lean manufacturing but the act of throwing away a build sheet would be wasted labor, time and money.

 

"Hid" is not the proper word. Let's not think of it as someone putting it up there and wedging it in there. It should be known that every sub line, every shop got a manifest, which is what these actually are called. 99% of them are thrown away in a trash bin that is right there. The ones that survive are always the same type; they're in a seat, they're above the gas tank, they're in between a fender and a fender liner. These aren't put there by the line worker, they are left there by the line worker because they are already there as part of the build process. So, he's not hiding it, he's just not removing it. Those are there on the seats because the sheet is already there on a component, and it just gets built in in-place.

 

Build sheets were ways to track parts and make sure they got to their destinations. That’s it. Before bar coding and 2D matrix scanning. After doing a job for a while you didn’t need them. You recognized the part and where it was installed. So many times sheets got installed too. Parts simple as gas tanks or seats were visibly confirmed so most had sheets that got installed with the part. Them stuffed inside seats are proof they really were not used to assemble the car. Just to track parts.

 

The main reason the manifests were there is to pick the appropriate part for the car off the flowrack.

 

ask yourself, why would a factory assembly worker do this?? Not GM...

 

Why is the sky blue?
Why is grass green?
Did DB Cooper actually succeed?
Some questions will just never be answered.

 

Some people are just to lazy to take care of it properly . I know its not the same thing but ive seen coffee cups and hardroll wrappers in walls and floors when tearing into construction projects guess they figure nobody will ever see it.

 

around that time the Union and GM had a big hate on before the September 15 1970 strike . Don’t know when your car was made but it doesn’t matter..before or after the strike

workers didn’t give a **** and actually sabotaged many things in the plants….GM management accused the union of sabotage many times. the Union was out for over two months.

 

Not uncommon. On one of my brand X cars, I found 4 build sheets, line inspection cards, and some paper coffee cups in there...

 

I'm surprised it was even the one for your car. People find broadcast cards and build sheets for other cars quite often

 

The dealer found a empty whiskey bottle in my brothers 73 Cutlass when he brought it in for an annoying rattle.

 

As someone who works in a Big 3 factory, I can tell you working on an assembly line isn’t easy, regardless of what the public and haters think. There are people in here whose only purpose is to calculate exactly how long a specific lists of tasks should take. And if a worker figures out how to assemble part A with part B faster than the time study estimates, they will promptly add Part C.

 

I have heard about the sabotage. While I have had some really bad days in this place, I can proudly say I have never knowingly sent out substandard parts.

I’m a firm believer in not biting the hand that feeds you.

Having said that, I have “accidentally” damaged things to force management to either repair or replace things. For example, I use to run a large heat treat furnace. The furnace in particular ran the transfer gears for the fwd transmissions. The gears were stacked onto racks made of some very expensive alloy. After a few thousand cycles thru the furnaces, some of the racks didn’t stack very well. The doors on the furnace would open every 18 minutes, once a rack was in the furnace it wouldn’t come out until 16 hours later. So obviously, the furnace held ALOT of parts!!

Occasionally, the racks would fall over inside the furnace. The only way to get them out was to cool down the furnace, and vent the atmosphere inside. Needless to say, the means everything in the furnace was scrapped, meaning lots of lost parts and money. Management was not happy when that happened! After seeing a friend of mine get chewed out for a wrecked furnace, I decided to accidentally” drop a few of the really screwed up racks, breaking them to the point they couldn’t be used. Once the number of good racks got low enough that it started to affect production counts, suddenly there was money in the budget to replace them.

As long as a counter in here is clicking somewhere, top brass is happy!!!

 

I've never been the guy to do the processing in my OEM, but I have been the guy to use their processing to make sure my machine will fit in there. I've got a conveyor in West Assembly at my home plant that is the fastest piece of equipment in the shop. It runs a full 3 seconds faster than anything else, and I fudged some numbers to call it officially slower than it was. That thing will move some seats.

 

I understand all of the answers. It still puzzles me why the person would tear up the sheet. My car was built in March of 1970.
I'm sure there where union tensions going on at that time. but having the sheet torn up in there didn't make for a bad part.
Thanks for all the replies. It's great to hear from people who actually worked in the business.

 

It may just have been their way of expressing "I'm done". It was basically trash, at that point.

 

reading this over again I doubt it was torn up by anybody and then put between the seat cover and the padding.

being between the seat cover and the padding , it would get ripped or torn when the first person person sat on the seat, and torn more each time another person sat on it.

the padding and cover fabric stretches when sat on,, the paper won’t. no person on an assembly line would have the time to tear up that sheet into that many pieces pieces like that. if purposely torn like that, it means a person would have to use their index finger and thumb on each hand, gently rip off a square, then another, and another, and another and so on.

try tearing a piece of paper into that many squares as that sheet..then think to yourself…would someone on an assembly line really do that? no

paper is also easier to be torn the older and drier it gets.
so the final analogy in the mystery is..a lazy or disgruntled Union worker threw it in between the fabric and padding, then the above took its toll over the years..that’s it.

 

That sounds right. That would explain why the pieces are stained differently. Thanks.
I'm sure no one working on the line would have imagined we'd be studying their every move on the assembly line
55 years later.

 

Those sheets meant nothing once said assembly was installed. They were not supposed to be left in the car. So consider yourself lucky you found one.