Laying it on thick

[<JHertzman@xxxxxxx>]

In AD7-025 Scott Fisher instructs "Why Not to Strip Paint" with a horror story
about the thick layers of body filler he found on his Giulia 1300 Junior, "Up
to 1/8" in places, in places nearly 1/4". He digresses on the crudities of a
friend's Ferrari, and says about his Alfa that "it turns out that the state of
the panel-pressing art in the mid Sixties was not up to the visual demands of
Bertone, at least.  So standard procedure was to fit the panels onto the car,
and then have workers hand-apply filler to get various bits of the car to line
up properly. - - In any case, the economics of Italy in the mid Sixties were
such that the factory could hire and train workers for little enough that they
could afford to spend now-precious hand labor on getting the panels to line
up."

I am skeptical. For many reasons I have long been interested in the difficult
progression from artisan production, labor-intensive and skill-dependant, to
industrial production, more dependant on the certainty of the rote application
of tooling, whether robotic (which Scott alluded to) or repetitive manual
drudgery. There was a vast difference between the production of the first few
Giulietta Sprints at Bertone, the production of the next few hundred, and the
mature production of the 'same' car in its last years. With the introduction
of the Giulia Sprint GT (and its many derivatives) it was still 'Disegno di
Bertone' but production was entirely at the brand-new state-of-the-art
facility in Arese, every bit as up-to-date as anything in Stuttgart, Munich or
Turin. Leaving out the Giulia Sprint GT, Giulia Sprint GT Veloce, and the 1750
GT Veloce, the production level of just the Juniors alone averaged nearly a
thousand cars a month, year-in and year-out, without allowing for vacations or
strikes. This was not a fitted-by-hand operation in the sense he implies. 

Further, I owned from new three cars from Arese during this period, a Giulia
Super, a 1750 GT Veloce and a 2000 Berlina (two of which I still have) and all
three had small spots of the very minor nicks which a well-pressed panel may
pick up in storage and handling, minidents which would have been filled with
primer-surfacer in a repaint but which were not filled in production, as they
would have been if filler was being slathered. The cars I owned don't prove
anything about the car Scott owns, but I am fairly certain that the standards
of panel-pressing and assembly-jigging at Arese in the sixties were high
enough that there were no cheap laborers applying thick layers of body filler
to get various bits of the car to line up properly. Perhaps Scott's car was
the victim of fraternity pranks or an irate wife with a hammer, hailstorms or
some other accidents, but I doubt that it left Arese in the condition he
suggests. Your car may be different; prudent buyers will still check Bondo
with magnets.

John

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