C3 Corvette Assembly Line, circa 1980

Every C3 Corvette from 1968 through the summer of 1981 was built in St. Louis, Missouri, at the same plant that had been turning out Corvettes since 1954. The photos here were taken on that line around 1980, near the end of its run.

Building a Corvette was never quite like building a normal car. The body panels were hand-laid fiberglass, bonded together and lowered onto the chassis rather than stamped out of steel, so the line moved at its own pace with plenty of hand work at every station. In 1981 production wound down here and shifted to a new plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where Corvettes are still built today. For a few months that year both plants ran at once.

All told, well over half a million C3s came down lines like this one between 1968 and 1982. Click any photo to see it full size.