This info was taken from the winged warriors web site
http://www.wwnboa.org/slaprer.htmVIN tags didn't appear until the car was in the Trim department. They were situated in order in wooden trays and brought down from the Broadcast Area which was then located overhead. In later years, the Broadcast Area was moved down to the floor.
The fender tags appeared in the body shop. They were stamped by a machine that ran across the blank tag like a typewriter, done very fast. The fender tags were located on the inner fender because that is the one part that every car had and were all the same basic construction to use as a reference point.
Gary also told us how those VIN stampings were made. There were two motor lines at the plant. When a car went through the motor line, as soon as the transmission was installed, it received VIN stampings. There were five sets of fixtures, there were numbers that went into each fixture and then it was clamped onto the engine. A pneumatic burp gun was then used to stamp the VIN into the metal. The engine was painted before the numbers were stamped, so the numbers were left in bare metal.
The confidential numbers that were stamped on various other parts of the car were stamped with a huge machine...so big you could hardly pull it down to make the stamping. The confidential numbers were painted over in the bodyshop. Gary remembers one humorous episode where a new hire was supposed to be putting the confidential numbers on the cars as they came by his station. A foreman saw him sitting there leisurely reading a magazine and went over to ask why he wasn't up working. The new hire answered that this was the "easiest job in the world" and didn't take much time so he was relaxing in-between cars. Wondering how he could be stamping each of those cars with different numbers and have that much free time, the foreman stood back and watched the new hire as the next car came down the line. He simply stood up and pulled the machine down and stamped the numbers on the car body-without ever changing the numbers! He had been stamping the same numbers on every car!
Broadcast sheet paper came to the plant pre-printed and folded in boxes. IBM teletype machines printed the various codes on broadcast sheets. The Broadcast Office at the front of the plant sent information about each car coordinated to small offices where there were machines located. Gary reports that there were 30 track (broadcast) machines in the plant. There were five small printing machines in Paint and Bodyshop alone. Part of his job was to empty the trash barrels of track sheets (which, incidentally are now recycled). Imagine how many of those much-sought-after broadcast sheets Gary sent to the landfill!
The long, skinny aluminum tag that you sometimes see affixed to the forward screw on the fender ID tag is an inspector's tag. It will have a punched hole through it to signify that an inspector has looked at that car. The bodyshop had the aluminum strips for the inspectors to punch. Sometimes you will also find a hole punched through the fender tag itself. This is also an inspector's punch.
Here's a good example of how things could really get screwed up in the factory. One day, an inspector went to the area where the radiator core supports were being built and told them he'd "bought off" four hours worth of cars. He stamped (punched) inspectors tags for all of them, which amounted to about 250 cars, and then went home to lunch. As luck would have it, the cars got out of sequence that day in the assembly plant and the bodies were wrong. His job was to insure that the bodies were drilled correctly for the chrome. All of these 250 cars, which were on dollys in the metal shop, had to be coordinated with the correct track sheets. This caused the assembly line to be shut down for an hour while they got the cars back in sequence. The inspector got fired for about a week and then was transferred to another department.
