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I think the rate of production would make it tricky to batch produce - I would have thought it was more or less continuous. Maybe 250,000 Type 3s and a million Type 1s plus a few thousand Type 4s in 300 (360?) days in the same plant would need a lot of body parking places inside the building if it wasn't continuous. Since they knew what colour and spec was needed well in advance, it's just production planning to arrange for the right spec bodies to be made (hence the small body plates) and be matched to the appropriate spec. chassis/engine. They certainly appear to have devoted the line(s) to RHD production for periods of time or it would be miraculous for 3 of the 4 Squarebacks I've had here to have been close together in chassis numbers. I think the 3,000 a day was production of the 1500cc engines when quite a lot were for the transporters (64 I think). The chassis numbers confirm a rate of around 1000 a day in '71 anyway, which was the second highest rate of production. When I toured Wolfsburg in the early '90s with Otto Schubert, a retired VW production engineer (final job at VW was in charge of T4 Bus production planning at Hanover), he was very concerned at the number of completed cars with a marker block on the roof - these were the reject cars that the night shift would have to correct the faults on, and they were slotted in everywhere there was room! Next time I call in on him, I shall have a few more questions to ask. In his earlier days at VW he did the drawings for the machine tools that formed the louvres and headlight pressings on the Type 3 fenders. Somewhere I've a big fold-out showing production methods for the Beetle in the 60s - I'll look it out and see if it makes anything clearer. Dave. UK VW Type 3 & 4 Club http://www.hallvw.clara.co.uk/ ------ ------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <type3-off@vwtype3.org> For more help, see http://vwtype3.org/list/