Assembly line artifact find
 

Tonight after removing the driver's side sill plate & lower seat belt bolt in preparation for replacing the door weatherstripping I found a 6" x 6" metal plate with "DSO POLICE" written on both sides. The side that was up was painted the body color over raised hand painted lettering and the down side was painted a primer color with raised hand painted lettering, which was then drawn over with what appears to be a yellow ink pen. From the color of the floorpan under the plate I can tell that the car was painted with that plate just lying back there. I thought one of those assembly line plates might be under the carpet because when I first got the car & stepped on the footwell area behind the driver's seat a muffled metal moving sound could be heard. A neat piece of history to find. A not so neat piece of history to find was the mouse nest in the passenger side rear seat cushion bottom.

Nice find! :thumbsup:

Found mine, driver's side, wired up between the headliner and roof skin above the sunvisor! Probably hung down as it was on the assembly line then shoved into the opening when headliner was going in.

Neat stuff! They must have run out of those fancy metal tags when they sent my car down the line and just grabbed an old paint can lid. I believe one other CHP Mustang had this type of lid/tag in it too. Found mine under the carpet in the back.

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I found a paint lid in under the carpet of my old 87 FHP with wire twisted onto it and cut. The other half of the wire was still tied to roof behind the headliner about where the rear veiw mirror is. Pretty cool stuff...

Neat finds !
Even the mouse nest lol

To me, I don't think those items are factory daily things they did in the cars on the assembly line. I believe there was an assembly person ( s ) that liked leaving something in the cars that he assembled as a personal tag.

The paint lid from Mike's SSP, CHiPs no way the factory would have done that ! Even written as the series title lettering. Caps and lower case " i -s "
And a paint can lid ? Ford would have had special plates or something that were all the same AND in every car in the same place.

Why would they leave stuff in so many different places on different things ? I think some assembly person ( s ) did that as a personalized statement for building that car. lol Maybe a " note " to themselves as it went through the assembly line, then they left it in as a joke etc. or something. I have done that with customer's cars, vans, signs etc when I have lettered them. Put a joke on the bumper or under the hood so someday when he finds it he gets a good laugh, AND how long it took to find it lol

Cool stuff though ! It would be neat to find those responsible and say " HEY... look what we found after all of these years " lolol

Bet they would get a good laugh out of it.

Indeed some folks at the factory DID do some unorthodox things John. Witness the agency name that appears next to the DSO # on my buck tag. :)

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I've heard that these metal tags and the paint lids substitutes were official and meant to be attached to car bodies to identify them as special paint units (unique fleet color(s) and/or multi-tones) which required different handling in the paint department. They ended up inside cars along with many other items such as build sheets (we should all be so lucky!), QA cards and just plain trash because the line workers were too lazy to throw dispose of them properly and/or thought it was a pretty funny thing to do.

If memory serves me correct, the MN SSP you bought from me had the same thing.

Yes it did, only it was a larger square (7"x7" or 8"x8) and I think you said it was found under the driver's seat (it still had a piece of hanging wire through the hole in it). I never really looked under the carpet of the other dark shadow blue MSP SSP that I had (now in the MMOA collection) to see if it too had the metal plate with "DSO POLICE" on it.