Poor quality control, factory freaks, or mistakes?

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K

Kit Sullivan

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It seems lately that a lot of enthusiasts on this forum and many others have taken the attitude that cars from the 60s and 70s were built with poor attention to detail and poor quality control, and are using this assumption as the basis as to why thier particular car has some unexplained (or unknown to them) feature that doesn't fit in with what they assume are the standards used "back in the day".

The feeling that quality bcontrol was not an issue is not as true as some may think.

The Monroney act was still fresh in the minds of many (especially Ford) and it was very important that the product that was built, sold and delivered matched what they claimed they were selling to the customers.

To assume that something is a mistake due to carelessness or poor quality control on your car because you can't readily explain it any other way is an exercise in "bad science". To stste that something must be a "fact" based on anecdotal evidence and without any other input is a fallacy. Sounds like religion to me.

These cars are 40+ years old...whether you want to belive it or not, many things may have been changed or modified over the years without anyone realizing it.

Old owners sometimes forget changing things, cars are often "robbed" of desirable parts at a delaership and replaced with the lesser version of that part to make a car more sale-abale to a particular customer.

That 'robbed' car may then be sold to the first owner, who swears it "came from the factory" that way.

Family members sometimes change items on cars and others in the family may be unaware of it.

Over the years, I have herad all thse "facts" from supposedly knowledgable "experts":

all 71s came with chrome bumpers, all 72s had urathane. we know thats wrong.

There were mach 1 convertibles. Wrong again.

Magnums could be had on 73s...nope.

Front spoliers wee optional on Mach 1s. Never.

Windsors came in 71-73s. No again.

And many more.

Some things are just bound to remain a mystery...an assumption of fact is not a fact at all.

 
I find your logic sound and agree, mostly. 302 Windsors did come in 71-73 Mustangs 351 Windsors did come in the Mexican built Mustangs.

I know I am picking nits with that statement, but overly broad statements tend to hold a lot of nits.

And I am not going to say it was a quality control issue, but fit and finish standards were quite different in 1973 than they are today.

Mach 1 stripe kits installed at the dealer on a convertible or a coupe ordered with the appropriate equipment made what may well have been sold as a "Mach 1" though I don't imagine that would have been known to many owners at the time.

We are lucky to live in an age where information is so readily available. It wasn't so, not so long ago.

 
My Marti Report said the car came with 14" "Wheel Covers," but did not specify which wheels covers (dog dish, sport, et al).

Am I wrong to simply assume it was "Sport Covers," since I prefer those to the corporate "dog dish" application?

That's the bad thing about having such a cavalier effort towards keeping records.

 
Jeff,

You are right, Mextangs certainly did have 351 Windsors, but I am just referring to USA made Mustangs, which of course never had the 351 Windsors.

The 302 did come from the same family of blocks as the 351 Windsor, and many have taken to calling them "302 Windsors". I don't subscribe to that, only because Ford never really referred to them that way, simply because there was no need to differentiate them from any other Ford-produced 302 engine. The Windsor moniker on the 351 was used primarily to denote it from the 351 Cleveland...as we all know.

Not sure if this true, but I heard this from someone years ago:

When a new 352-inch small block was developed by Ford, it was given the official size designation of "351" to keep it seperate from the older "352" truck engine (FE series) Ford sold. So it was simply "351".

Then...the new high-performance 351-inch engine came about, requiring "Cleveland" and "Windsor" names to keep them seperate. I never did the math to verify that story, though.

 
True, but body and gap fitment issues were not out of the ordinary. Not to the point of your average Jethro and Jed's Cut-Price Bodyshop clunker, but there are some bad factory gaps out there.

That, and there are also variances in factory gaps. I've seen perfectly intact cars with completely different door gaps - and not due to unibody sagging either, or door sagging.

Case in point, my '71 has huge gaps at the top of the doors, which taper to an even gap from the feature line down to the bottom. There is a bit of sag in this door, but you're not going to fix that gap adjusting the door. Point it up and it won't match the quarter. Bring it both back and up, and you'll throw off the lower gap. I know there IS room for improvement from what's shown here, but it's never going to look perfect.

2ujt6c3.jpg


Yet, it's still not even close to what one might assume is factory acceptable, but it is. In this case - there's nothing wrong with the gap as it is.

By comparison, my Dearborn '72 has very tight factory gaps which taper a bit at the top. I immediately suspected the car of sagging due to its substantial rot - but the gap is more or less even down the whole length, and jacking it up on its rear torque boxes caused no change in the gap. I'm convinced it isn't sagging.

2rrxoo4.jpg


The RH side is even kookier, with gaps that get narrower and wider over short distances. It's just the way they made them. I defy anyone to adjust the gaps on my '71 to look absolutely identical to this '72 - using only the door hinge and striker for adjustment. Can't be done without custom bodywork. There's a variance in the build, and that's just the way it is.

1zezdl4.jpg


Now the REAL trick is to know when a bad gap is normal and when it is not normal. Convertibles are great learning tools for this, as every other one out there is a sagging rust pile.

Windsors came in 71-73s. No again.
As in 351W's, that is.

EDIT: Never mind, everybody else beat me to the punch while I was out taking photos.

-Kurt

 
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Actually, cars do "sag upwards", especially our Mustangs. Jacking a car in the wrong spot in the center can easily tweak a high spot in the center of the unibody. That is actually kind of common on our cars.

 
Actually, cars do "sag upwards", especially our Mustangs. Jacking a car in the wrong spot in the center can easily tweak a high spot in the center of the unibody. That is actually kind of common on our cars.
If there really was a center to jack from on our cars. Other than the floorpan reinforcements, it's not that hard to miss the torque boxes.

That said, you'd think that 30 years of banging over speed bumps would cause the worked metal in that area to ease back into shape.

-Kurt

 
Quality of paint was definitely a problem on my 73 Convertible. The day it left the dealership new we noticed you could see primer on the tail light panel above the right rear tail light. The tail light panel around the tail lights suffered from rust early in ownership.

The mis-alignment of the trunk lid was obvious when new also. In fact it appeared the left rear quarter panel was misaligned a the seam. Back in the mid-70's my friends father was a body man and he tried to align the trunk lid a little better, but indicated it was the quarter panel that was the problem.

Other than those two things I believe the fit and finish was OK for the time as compared to other cars I owned.

 
'To stste that something must be a "fact" based on anecdotal evidence and without any other input is a fallacy. Sounds like religion to me."
Watch it, Kit. Mustangs are my religion! :D

Don't underestimate Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration!

;)

-Kurt

 
Assembly lines for our cars were still pretty basic as was the assembly orders. A lot of it could be overridden by an executive who wanted a car in a specific way. If a vice president really wanted a Windsor they could have made it happen. I am not saying it did. I am just saying it would have been a lot easier to override the system 44 years ago.

 
I have an uncle that worked for Ford in the Lorain OH plant from the late 60's then moved to the Kentucky plant in the 90's, and many times he said, they did what they had to do to get the production numbers out the door.

he worked the assy line, and he said, as long as its within spec, they let it go, or they would substitute parts on the go as long as it was approved by the line supervisor, and when he worked in the Kentucky plant he was in QC, and he said, some times the gaps were way off, but they were within the engineering specs, they would let it go.

 
I have an uncle that worked for Ford in the Lorain OH plant from the late 60's then moved to the Kentucky plant in the 90's, and many times he said, they did what they had to do to get the production numbers out the door.

he worked the assy line, and he said, as long as its within spec, they let it go, or they would substitute parts on the go as long as it was approved by the line supervisor, and when he worked in the Kentucky plant he was in QC, and he said, some times the gaps were way off, but they were within the engineering specs, they would let it go.
I noticed some gaps between seams when I cleaned removed factory undercoat on bottom of my car. One side looks flush and nice, other side looked sloppy. I looked it over real good for hidden rust or something but couldn't find a legit reason for it. Me and dad chucked it up to build quality. My dads been a ford tech for almost 40 years and said its nothing to worry about and 70's cars were common to have little things "not so perfect". Eh anyways it really doesn't bother me as I'm not gung ho purist about my car. Maybe if I had a special mustang I'd think differently.

Sent from my SCH-S960L using Tapatalk

 
I had a 97' expedition, 1 owner (me) it was missing 3 bolts that hold the dash in place, I drove the car for a few weeks and it started to rattle, so I started to look around, and I noticed them missing, so I took it to the dealer, and they laughed and said " its your typical Ford, we'll take care of it."

 
'To stste that something must be a "fact" based on anecdotal evidence and without any other input is a fallacy. Sounds like religion to me."
Watch it, Kit. Mustangs are my religion! :D

Don't underestimate Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration!

;)

-Kurt
and i take lightly any insult cast my direction for grammatical errors, rants of no value, lack of knowledge whole or in part .... but I doubt you will find any day that I make a conscious decision to allow someone to insult religion. I'm not the pushover other Christians have trained themselves to be these days.

 
Poor quality control, factory freaks, or mistakes?

We are talking about us, the forum members here, right????

 
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