Vise grips, clamps, rulers, and body tools ensure all dimensions are exact before any welding takes place. The entire assembly process is accomplished by one fabricator for each body. If it takes greater force than one person delivers to fit panels, then the fitment is reworked so no significant amounts of tension are within the assembly.
“For the Camaro and Firebird bodies, there is a floor fixture and an in-car body fixture,” Whitaker continues. “The body fixture is very sophisticated. Many individual fixture pieces come in and out as we build the car. Everything is held together with 3/8-inch Allen bolts, nuts, and all straight-line clamps that fit in the factory tooling holes.”
All of the fixture designs are rather ingenious, utilizing the varied sections of fixtures that are continuously installed and then removed. Whitaker explains you would have a “building a ship in a bottle” result when removing the fixtures from the final body assembly.
The overall body jig was designed with each original tooling hole accurately locating each panel. No clamping or welding points are sacrificed to work around the fixture. When the jig is removed from the completed body, it is not a "ship in the bottle" situation.
“The fixture even has different go/no-go gauges mounted on the jig during the assembly process,” Whitaker explains. “These gauges are not used to hold any panels. They ensure the doors, all hinges, and window openings are accurately located and are to shape. We want customers to have as little bodywork or fitment issues around the window glass as absolutely possible.”
Many of the panels from Golden Star Auto have been designed to include multiple steps in the shaping process. These new manufacturing processes follow the latest in automobile manufacturing technology. During the panel forming, a multistage process separates stamping and metal stretching as two different steps to remove tension in a finished panel.