Busiest production month at DMC

[Chris Hawes]

Seeing vin 5200 (owned by newcomer Greetz in The Netherlands) made me think time wise how far apart our two cars were built. The factory spec of the two is identical (same bonnet, transmission, Craig radio and digital clock next to the rheostat and coloured interior etc).



October 1981 had 22 working days (if based on a five day week). As per Knut’s chart above found on page 4 of http://www.dmcnews.com/faq/img/news/news23.pdf

The above chart shows that 1825 cars were built in that month. This means an average of 83 cars were completed during each working day of this month.

If we base 7.5 working hours per shift (additional time over the shift was spent on lunch/breaks) then just over 11 cars per hour were produced and therefore one car completed every 5-6 minutes. This means that Greetz’s car (vin 5200) was built around 5 hours ahead of mine (vin 5255) which in turn was built around 30-36 minutes before vin 5261 the most famous movie DeLorean of all… the Back To The Future ‘Twin Pines’ mall sequence car.



Perhaps Neal Barclay (only former DMC employee actively on the forum?) can confirm that it was a 5 day working week in the factory at this time? Are the hours worked above close to how it really was?

No matter how you look at it, 1825 cars in one month was excellent progress and had this been maintained DMC would have been producing over 20k cars per year...

http://www.dmcnews.com/faq/img/news/n_vinlst.pdf
Knut has been taking updates from owners for the next vin list. See what is currently written about your vin...

Imagine being able to wander the factory watching your own DMC-12 being built...

[Barson]

is it safe to assume that VINs were riveted to cars in a serial fashion?

i.e. would the guys and girls building the cars have a single stack of plates taking from the top one at a time and going down the line putting them on the new cars, in order?

This matters if we're talking about how far cars are apart in minutes/hours of being made.

time for Neal to make an appearance. :lol:

Barzo

[Guinney1971]

that vin list is so cool, I love browsing through it.

something I've only just noticed though, is that Flopsy's vin number is the last one in a batch of 51 manual cars built, then the next 19 are automatics, then another batch of manuals were built.

Also, looking at that graph, it shows that black interior cars were still being built (or vin'd at least) as late as November 81 - and I always thought that the black interiors stopped around August....

Learn summat new every day I guess!

[Rich H]

Quote:therefore one car completed every 5-6 minutes

Contrast that to the Avensis/Corolla production line in Derby which creates a car every 62 seconds
Employs just 3,700 people and creates some 220,000 vehicles a year

[neal]

I will try and answer this the best I can remember.

The workers on the assembly line worked two 12 hour shifts over 5 days, but the weekend was overtime.
The hours for weekend overtime working were Saturday 8am to 12pm and
Sunday was 8am to 4 30 pm but some workers stayed to 8pm.

so you can say that it was 24 hours a day over 6 days.

when I worked the night shift, the hours were 8pm to 8am Sunday night to Friday morning.

As for the vin numbers, I do not know who put them on or when.

Now Chris over to you to work out the maths