Does anyone have a photo taken during 308 GT4 production? I would really appreciate seeing one. Thanks, -r P.S. I agree that 'hand assembled' would probably be the best description of 308 production.
yes, some of the early 77's were fiberglass. mine has a low serial number for a steel car and a november 76 build date. thanks for the time frame, i never knew it was "only" 3 or 4 months!
Great photo, thanks! Do you think the rear panels were pressed as one piece (as they appear in the photo) or would these have been made up of 3 panels welded together?
Hand made ..... well, it could be my GTB this guy was HAMMERING somewhere along the assembly line !!!!! AFTER PAINTING, mind you. I don't know much about 3x8 production, really. I think I have a pic in a magazine or book somwhere, showing a 328 body in pink primer. Bill, no hi-res, but will try to PM the original scan. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Karen, I think the steel sections were composed of several pieces, seems logic seeing the spare body-parts. The GRP-versions though may well have been laid up in a single mould. (pics posted before by Jeff Howe, FoUK) Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
I remembered Mr. Pinninferinna speaking at one of the Concorso Italiano events on that exact subject. During that time, fiberglass was a new material for Ferrari bodies. We had managed to complete several 308's when Enzo came up to me and said to discontinue the use of fiberglass, because it was more notable to the American Corvette his words!
Andrewg and Kingpin - thnaks for the photos and info! Racer X - sorry to be picky, but can you please spell Mr. Farina's name correctly in future! Pininfarina is the company.
The Mecedes world makes use of the term "hand finished" to denote the process used on its low volume prestige cars (such as the 220SEb) from the standard "production line" cars. Manual labor is used for assembly in both cases, but the "hand finished" cars receive much more manual labor by higher trained craftsmen, so the fit and finish is significantly better than the "production line" cars though both use many of the same components. In my opinion, this "hand finished" definition is a good description of the 308 assembly process. (Restoring a handmade or hand finsihed car is typically much more difficult than working on a production line car as you'll often find one-off modifications that keep "standard" replacement bits from fitting...) Bill
Hmmm. Looks like a panel beating shop to me. Like a high school metal shop, lol. Look at all the people doing what apears to be handwork, like the guy with the hammer tapping on the rear panel resting on a bench. Look at the gas welding sets around that shop. To the far right of the left hand pic, is a guy crouching on the floor that appears to be about to weld on a panel. just above his head to the left, is what appears to be a panel resting on some kind of equipment. That is not something you would see at any major car manufacturer. So maybe not hand beaten metal per se, but certainly a lot of handwork to fit all the metal together and onto the "hand built" chassis. Certainly the 308 was the last car built that way, as the 348 and onward are a pressed steel chassis. An amazing picture to see. Do you have more, or the rest of the right hand pic?
Quite right. Back then they manually pressed panels and hand beat them to finish at ITCA, a division of Fiat just outside of Turin. The tube frame chassis was made by Vaccari in Modena. Then the body panels and chassis were shipped to Scaglietti where they were jig aligned and hand welded. Once finished they were trucked 10 miles to Ferrari in Maranello where they were dipped into a cataphoric primer tank. Then robotic sprayers shot a primer coat. They were then shot by hand with a high-build filler, and then a sealer. After the prep work, they were shot by hand with 9 coats of Eurolac paint to finish. IMHO, that's what I call a hand built car.
Did they use the JIT (just in time) principle for all of this? Oh, wait, Italy in the seventies, they must have had large buffer stocks between each step, in case there was a strike somewhere in the chain.
There were seven 1977 308GTB's with hand-hammered steel bodys. When they switched from fiberglass to steel they didn't have the new machines instantly so they handhammered cars for a while. See this site for info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_308GTB I am close friends with the person who owns the one white hardtop.
