Technical Im just Baffled... How did it get there...

So I started on a customers car and started stripping her down... Took off the dor panels which looked like they had never been off before and found this sitting at the bottom of the door... A baby rattle. Fairly old from the looks of it... Now my question is... How in the world did it get down there?!!!

Its a 4 door impala.

Any one else find weird stuff in weird places?

 

Put in when assembled at the factory as a joke to drive the buyer wild when trying to find the "rattle" in his new car.

 

I bought a '49 ford coupe from the original owners estate once, 31,000 miles on it and fully intact. When we gutted the interior we found newspapers from 1955 behind the door panels. I figured the car must have needed additional insulation.


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That would be pretty funny... This car came out of storage since the 70s...

 

I was repairing a year old Dodge conversion van that was hit in the front in the 70's.. The owner said I should check to see if I could found anything loose when I had the front end apart. He said he had taken it back to the dealership a bunch of times but they couldn't find anything. When I had the fender off in the cowl I found a seven-up bottle with a note in it. The note said HA Ha you found me.....How low was that.....

 

That was a common trick when cars were "on the assembly line."

 

Only thing I could come up with is it was inserted when the window was down.

I'd blame the square peg in the square hole game.

 

No it was one of those cry babies we all know at work lost his rattle......
I didn't know of anyone putting junk inside the car to make it rattle. I did however lose a couple of Proto 1/4 drive ratchets with 10 mm sockets into the 1/4's of the Buick while trying to change an opera light. After the second one I tied string on the ratchet before starting to change the lites.

 

When I started working on the 1954 Ranch Wagon I pulled the passenger side door panel off which had never been removed and found literally thousands of small rubber grommets,they had gotten sticky and stuck together in a massive blob and stuck inside the bottom of the door.

After nearly 50 years they were now hard & petrified. HRP

 

My 1976 Ford F-150 had a shop apron stuffed in the passenger door. Found it when we had it Z-Barted. Bob

 

I might add that my suspicion was as the wagon was on the assembly line in Norfolk and some line worker just unloaded his shop apron or a box of grommets at quitting time. HRP

 

I worked for a Local Ford dealer through the early 80's. My job was rattles, squeaks, water leaks, wind noise.....all the fun stuff! Found handsfull of screws left everywhere so they would roll forward at take off and back when stopping. Half eaten sandwiches stuffed in heater vents and such. The best one was a bottle hanging by a string in the rear door panel area. It had a note as well. Nice one!

 

Assembly line work is - - - boring. That is how some demented minds get their jollies! I brought a new Chrysler (1967) in from the car lot - work order said to correct the miss in the engine (383). Someone in engine assembly had conveniently placed a 1/2" flat washer between the block and head gasket before bolting everything down. How it passed initial run-in and final inspection before leaving the plant is anyone's guess.
Quality control is JOB #1 only at Ford - - - apparently, lol.

 

This is kinda related to hiding things when they were new.....I built a 1931 Model A sedan with all Chrome Jag rearend and suspension back in 1982...car was pretty trick...it brought $20k back then....before we installed the headliner, I took markers and wrote the history of the car from the time purchased and person I bought it from up till the time the headliner was installed....I also wrote my name and contact info so I would be fairly easy to find....I sold it in '83..bought it back in '96 and sold it a few months later again... interior was all still intact...this past Oct I saw it pull in at one of the Event Stops at Cruising the Coast...walked over to the guy and he was telling this man about the car...I figured I'd listen for a little...he told the guy he really didn't know anything about the car other than what was visible cause he had bought it....I asked if I could say something about the car and started telling the guy about the car and I told them the story......they thought it was pretty cool......one day someone will tear the headliner out and be shocked......they may even contact me...that would be nice.

 

I don't buy the "placed there on the assembly line" theory.

A handful of washers or screws maybe.

But a baby rattle???? C'mon........

 

Twenty or so years ago I saw an old Ford that a friend was rebuilding. On the floorpan (silver) was written in red paint marker, For a great Bxxx Jxx call XXX-XXX-XXXX, ask for Joe. (there was a real looking phone number and a last name for Joe) No wonder Ford had a lot of sexual harassment lawsuits!
No I didn't call the number!!!!!

Edit had to change the make so it is HAMB friendly, story is true though!

 

I worked for a Pontiac-Buick Dealership in the early '60's and the new car detail man had several items on his desk that he had pulled out of door and quarter panels,, that stuff did happen.

 

True story. My Dad bought a brand new 55 Ford. It had a rattle that drove him nuts just after he took delivery. Turns out someone left an empty Coke bottle in the left rear quarter. Accident/on purpose, who knows?

 

Not just American mfrs, I worked for Porsche for many years, one time we had a new 911 come in with a terrible rattle, finally found an empty schnapps bottle in the rear seat quarter panel!

 

I won't get into the union thing. I've worked on both sides of that fence.

But I'm amazed that this bottle in the fender thing is so common!

when I was in school I was doing pre-delivery and lube jobs at the AMC dealer in Ogden Utah. They sent me to drive a newish AMC wagon with a "funny noise" and see where it was. I went over a couple speed bumps and heard this clunk.

Sure enough it was a coke bottle in the front fender.

 

I disagree with the twenty dollars an hour in 1966. I was on the GM line and we worked a lot of hours each week. But we were not making anything close to that. In the two dollar an hour range.

 

Guys... Can we stop arguing about unions?

 

not just american cars even the japanese have a sense of humor , when I worked at a Kawasaki /yamaha dealer when I was in high school every once and a while we would get a bike that would have a problem , on the Kawas it was engine related , often one of the spark plugs was zero gapped or tape on a point set and you could see were they hit it on the bench , the yamahas it was tape or celophane wrapped around the fuel filter in the tank or a blob of what looked like rice in the fuel line .

 

In 72, I got my first "Good" job. UAW union shop, started out at 3.08/hr and thought I was in high cotton. At the end of the year we all got a 10% bonus. It was rumored that the biggest check was about $2800, but the guy worked all the overtime he could get, probable got $10-11/hr for his straight time.

 

That is really cool. Everyone who has built a car should do the same so as to memorialize the history of the car.

 

We memorialize them here.

Data will be available to future owners like it never was for us.

 

This was in the drivers door of my 1930 Tudor.

It came out of Iowa

 

I found a screwdriver in the rocker panel of a 51 Chevrolet I am working on. that would have been an interesting rattle to try to find, there was no way to get it out without cutting up the rocker... I know exactly how it got there, they previous shop that worked on it put it there when they hap-hazardly installed a poorly fitting inner rocker "patch panel". I ripped it all out and re did it with the proper parts cut from a parts car.

I think I will start carrying it around with me so when I see the guy at a show I can return it to him.

 

I'll resist the temptation to make a corny wise crack.

You could make a couple of pipes though.

 

I bought a used 57 Chevy around 1970. My baby daughter lost her pacifier down in the crack of the back seat. I took the bottom of the seat out, and under it was a poloroid of a couple having sex in that very back seat. On the back was written, "hope you like this car as much as we did." We did.