I have those as well. I gave up on them. They are way too fat as factory marks I see are pretty thin. Matched against original marks the Marcal yellow is way too dull. It’s really noticeable. Depends how picky you are.
Dave, They each have their proper application (the thick and thin markers). My point was that Quanta sells the Markal marker for $5.50 and and a person can save a few bucks buying them elsewhere.
One had to wonder if they just used the lowly China Marker. GM was cheap and wouldn’t have wanted workers to waste one second being unsafe sharpening a crayon with a knife. My bet is on these. Peel it off and throw waste on the floor. https://www.google.com/search?q=chi...8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=TusPHt3VO-GmwM:
I hear you but believe me I have way over thought this and experimented with them. No way with all the skinny original marks I find did they use those thick crayons. Their yellow is way to dull.
I have seen a "P" on a power drum brake car from Flint. It was actually a "PC" as it was a 4-speed car. Duane
Here is a 71 Stage 1 picture I took at the GS Nationals years ago. It had a really big bright yellow D.
The different marking crayons compared. It’s tougher to get a finer line with the big Marcals. You have to keep cutting the end as well as the surface dries out and you need to sharpen to get fresh writing surface. Near impossible to get to a sharp point as well. This has been my experience with them anyway.
Joe it’s interesting your car has the interior code there as well. I usually don’t see that. Burnished saddle bench. And bamboo cream. Strange no top code or double color?
Yes it is, the factory painted over them. I've been in the restoration business for 45 years and I know what factory firewall paint looks like as compared to a repaint. In addition, many times when people see these crayon markings they try unsuccessfully to find out what they mean, I read an article years ago where they interviewed a plant manager from back in the days when our cars were built and he stated that often times the line workers would communicate with each other by writing on the firewalls of the cars going down the line. B8 might actually mean breakfast at 8:00am tomorrow. He said he gets a kick out of seeing this stuff duplicated on restorations. I'm not saying it's all bogus, we all know there some of it has merit, but as any restorer and you will find that most of them will agree that most of these marking were under the factory firewall paint. In the case of the GSX I restored, the D/C marking was indeed on top of the black and the car was an original 82,000 mile 2nd owner car when I got it, original paint and all.
That's all I found besides the spindles. Also the steering shaft. The driveshaft is all original and untouchable it has the color stripes on there as well I don't have any pics of that yet.
. I’ll have to disagree with you there. The paint codes were put on the already black firewall painted before body color. The painters of the body color needed to see that in order know what color to paint the car. With your way they would have to go back and paint the firewall black again? Why would they do that and potentially ruin fresh paint? You can see body color overspray on cowl and even edge of firewall because black was already there. I have seen to many examples of crayon marks that were not painted over.
At about 20:30 of this video you can see the black firewall before the car is painted. It’s Fisher Body.
Another thought on the paint marks. I was wondering if they could have been put there so the proper color front sheet metal got matched with the right car? Many colors could be confused because they were close or color blind people?
At Flint, the body had a number crayoned on the driver side saddle bag and this number was also referenced on the seat tag, and with the same number that was crayoned on the wheels. Now that was with Flint, other plants did things differently. Don't assume they all did things the same way. If you do then you would be wrong. Duane
