I was certainly grateful Pat shared his chrome bits. You should have seen that crew. I'm a very tactile person so I understood how they caressed some of Pat's goodies.
What astounded me was the level of interest in the Sample Book. BTW, they might be interested in purchasing one if anyone is willing to part with one in good shape.
As you can tell from the database Pat is a numbers guy. When he opened up the first box of Production Orders he went wide-eyed as one of the first things he found was a PO with no serial number on it. He matched the known info on that owner and was able to provide the Research Center with the serial number. They were thrilled, but they couldn't quite figure out new information coming into their possession without going through their dog and pony show. In all, Pat's work was deemed research, and was allowed to fill in the blanks of 40 cars on his first 6 hours there. We still couldn't find 1248 or a couple of pre-1000 serial numbers, but we did come across some confirming information.
It appears that I was confused about there being two body suppliers. There were references to Ionia Body and to Mitchell-Bentley Body. I thought the references were to two separate firms. M-B owned Ionia.
However, my story was absolutely true. Pat will correct me if I'm wrong. The Mitchell-Bentley company was just a body assembler while Hayes Body actually did the stamping, providing the parts to M-B.
We read about a conflict between Continental and M-B. That's where I got confused. It started with M-B complaining to Continental that they weren't making any money on producing bodies at 4 a day and wanted to bump to 6, but Continental didn't want to take 6.
There was a flurry of letters leading to Continental doing a study on opening their own body assembly plant and taking the work away from M-B, but there appeared to be contract problems. My memory was also correct in recalling that that 50% of the bodies being delivered were requiring many man-hours to make right before the car could be put into production. I've heard that parts were not exactly interchangeable.
Fascinating reading. Would go again.
Barry Wolk
Farmington Hills, MI
C5681126