Welcome to Throwback Monday where we take a look at how things once were, or at least how certain famous cars were once built. This week we’ve found some rare factory footage of the 1953 Chevrolet Corvette being cobbled together.
With the exception of the Suburban, the Corvette is Chevy’s longest running nameplate. Not only has it been the brand’s halo car for more than 60 years, but over that time it has also gained the unofficial title of America’s car, and arguably our country’s greatest series production sports car.
Of course, it almost might not have happened. The Corvette was GM’s first admissions that foreign makes could play a role in the domestic market. America began its love affair with the sports car after service men brought them home following WWII. European makers realized the economic value of the American market and started sending sports cars like Jaguar’s XK120 over to an eager car-buying public. The fact that an icon like film star Clark Gable bought a Jag probably riled GM’s marketers to no end.
The company’s answer was the ‘Vette, a car cobbled together from parts of existing cars, and featuring a fiberglass body that didn’t require investment in expensive tooling to produce. Designed by Harley Earl, the Corvette debuted at the 1953 Motorama Show, and shortly thereafter started production. That first year’s model run, 300 cars, all painted Polo White and dressed in Sportsman Red vinyl interiors, were hand built, and as no one had ever built a series production GRP ( fiberglass) car in any quantity before, the engineering was tweaked as those inital cars were built.
The Corvette was in fact such an experiment that it wasn’t even initially given its own factory space. Instead, that first model year’s cars were built in the back of Chevy’s customer delivery garage, located in Flint Michigan. Each Corvette body was made from 46 individual pieces. Those were supplied by the Molded Fiber Glass Company in Ashtabula, Ohio and were mounted by GM workers – many of whom wore a uniform not dissimilar to what a Soda Jerk might wear – to wooden bucks where they were then bonded together. The inital process was mostly trial and error, and even well into the late sixties Corvettes were known for having wavy somewhat haphazard fiberglass.
This silent video shows that assembly process taking place on the first year Corvettes. The fiberglass body parts are molded, and then the separate parts are joined together into a more recognizable shape. Finally the bodies are mated to the steel ladder frame chassis and away they go. It’s 22 minutes of pure Corvette porn.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/Oxyy8_K03w0[/youtube]
Image: YouTube