What is that and what does it mean? I don't know but would like to know.
Guess we haven't discussed this subject much over on this site. Sorry for going long but trying to describe a clear picture of the purpose and application. This could likely be used to start a new thread on the subject but will leave that to the owner of the site and management
This is the marking I was referring to in my earlier post
Its a Ford thing. At the car plant, because cars were not built in sequential order, the cars/bodies were assigned with temporary "rotation number" One for the assembly of the unibody assembly part of the build (first "half") then the bodies were placed in a holding area and rearranged in a new order and assigned a new number so that the line could flow smoothly and quickly by not placing difficult cars (example- big block, AC high option cars) one after the other but instead mixing in easier builds such as stripped down 6 cylinder or 289 builds. Cars/bodes were each assigned a second temporary rotation number to organize a series of cars in a new order and applied this number to the exterior of the still not complete car to the front of the car and the rear so workers could make out the number without looking at one of the copies of the buildsheets taped to the body. The second rotation number was identified/typed into the upper left hand corner of that buildsheet.
Workers, at the same time in remote areas of the plant, building sub-assemblies were using another copy of each cars buildsheet to build a needed assembly and at San Jose often wrote the second rotation number on some of those sub-assemblies rather than attaching the copy of the buildsheet to the assembly as was done at many of the other car plants. Numbers used were in continuous rotation and not dependent on the start of a day shift end end of a month. This year and plant used numbers from 001 to 999 before beginning over again at 001
Its believed that this is one of the reasons we don't find as many copies of build sheets in San Jose cars.
For my earlier post I was referring to a number applied to the rear of the car posted in a position where the rear license plate would later cover. It was applied typically in a contrasting color to the exterior color - black or white as shown below. Depending on which of the three usual workers assigned this task the location can be found also under the rear bumper on the taillight panel as shown in the bottom right
Used Shelby examples for this response though the practice is the same on SJ built Mustangs. Have hundreds of examples