FISHER BODY GENERAL MOTORS AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURE 44174

This film introduces its viewer to Fisher Body Division of General Motors, and touts the use of computers in the development and manufacturing of automobiles. Fisher Body was an automobile coachbuilder founded by the Fisher brothers in 1908 in Detroit, Michigan; it was a division of General Motors for many years, but in 1984 was dissolved into other General Motors divisions. Fisher & Company (originally Alrowa Metal Products) continues to use the name. The name was well known to the public, as General Motors vehicles displayed a "Body by Fisher" emblem on their door sill plates until the mid-1990s.

The pictures opens in a laboratory near Detroit, Michigan, as structural engineers are shown working at their computer screens and the narrator explains how their work is designed to test new automobile bodies. “What is remarkable is that these bodies have not yet been built,” the narrator says at mark 00:40. “They are mathematical models in a computer, and scale models in plastic and metal built with the aid of computers.” He continues at mark 01:06: “This use of computer design is the kind of innovative thinking necessary in the automotive industry today. The kind of thinking that traditionally has been the mark of the innovators of Fisher Body.” With that, a high-tech display (by 1980s standards) of the film’s title, “The Innovators,” appears on a large computer monitor. The camera pans along rolls of steel, lines of aluminum, glass, and plastic, and yards of fabric and vinyl all being shaped and cut “to satisfy the personal mobility desires and needs of people in the United States and around the world.”

The materials come from suppliers around the world, we are told at mark 02:28, to be joined together into a new automobile body. At mark 03:07, we see an animation of an cut-away car body, “the part of the car people ride in. The part they see and touch.” While automobile bodies were once separate from the frame. With the gas shortage of the 1970s came a need for lighter cards that would consume less fuel. By the 1980s, we are told, General Motors was working on fulfilling that need, and we see footage of a project team discussing potential designs and then implementing them. “The end result is … a full-sized model of each new GM automobile carefully sculpted in clay,” the audience is told starting at mark 06:30.

But there is still work to do before the model becomes a full-fledged automobile, and the film takes us to scenes of precision tools measuring each inch of the model and that data fed into a computer so that a steel-and-aluminum body can be created. The relatively “new” idea of using aluminum, along with plastic and steel, is visited beginning at mark 08:20, as we see engineers evaluating such material, followed by scenes of veteran factory workers assembling car parts by hand, and the “sweetening” of the design by engineers sitting at computer terminals. Computers can also be used to program tools to work on the rough shaping of some parts, “leaving the fine detail work to his irreplaceable human touch.”

A car model is next created in plastic, we learn at mark 11:30, at half the actual size, to learn about the structural performance of a vehicle. A half-scale steel model comes next. Although both versions are useful, they cannot totally replace the need for a full-size prototype body, we are told at mark 13:13. “Quality. Durability. And reliability. These are the goals of all this laboratory testing.”

As comprehensive as laboratory testing are, the narrator explains near mark 15:00 that they still do not provide as much information as actual on-road handling, conducted at General Motors Proving Ground facilities in Michigan and Arizona. A number of scenes shows the viewer the carefully controlled test procedures as we see vehicles zig in and out around orange cones and across twisting roads. Two years after the first clay model was made, the latest GM model is ready for production. Mark 17:30 shows us the various production processes, as the narrator explains that as many as 115 different models may be made in a single year. From the cutting of fabric to the welding of seams, the narrator explains that quality is always upmost importance.

Come mark 22:20, the viewer is told: “The body that began as designer’s clay has emerged in hard steel.”

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com

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