PoW wrote:I've seen photos of the assembly line in Hamtramck, MI, and all G741's left there in the 'native' color...either OD or blue, depending. Everything was the same color, with exception of some T-245 power plants being silver.
Factory frame & undercarriage primer was black. Red oxide was done in a depot rebuild, not factory.
The only ones I'm not sure about were the specials, like the R2 crash trucks built on a cab & chassis straight from Dodge.
Dennis
Hamtramck, Michigan was home to the Dodge Main complex, which built trucks up through the 1938 model year. After that date, truck production was moved north about four miles to the new and purpose built Warren Truck assembly plant in Warren, Michigan. After WWII, additions to the plant included a dedicated building for Route Van production, which eventually also included G-741 assembly on the same line. Production G-741 trucks were never assembled at Dodge Main in Hamtramck, although some component parts may have been manufactured there. It's possible that the prototypes were built at Dodge Main, although it's more likely they were assembled at Chrysler's old engineering headquarters in Highland Park, Michigan.
The original Albert Kahn-designed Warren Truck building is still there, buried within the much enlarged Warren Truck complex, and still assembling Ram trucks. The Route Van building is still there, too, I think, although it has been subsumed by the many additions to the complex, which now extends one mile as a continuous structure from Warren Stamping on the north end to the truck body plant on the south end, with the original building about in the middle.
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, IT IS THEIR RIGHT, IT IS THEIR DUTY, TO THROW OFF SUCH GOVERNMENT...” -Declaration of Independence, 1776
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