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Having worked for a large manufacturing company most of my life I am quite aware that production numbers (amount produced) were most important.
Were any production numbers ever saved on the models produced by Lesney during there existence? And if so what were the numbers on each model.
At the company I worked for we made millions of the same parts for many years and we knew exactly the total produced, so I would think that somewhere those numbers would be available if ever saved from the files of the Lesney Products & Co. LTD.

This is a subject I do find very interesting and has cropped up before in relation to Lesney products but not necessarily on this forum.

Once a company is run by accountants, it is important to know of production numbers. The early History of Lesney does not reveal the information we require regards production numbers. We only see comments like "Millions of that model were produced" which of course goes without saying. We only need to look at the number of Years our favourite models were in production (somebody could actually sit down and do the number crunching to come up with a good ball-park figure of production quantities).

Nobody as far as I know in our hobby has come forward with information as to what happened to the records, or if they have survived, where they went.

Ghosthunter.

Quite by chance, I had a conversation this evening with someone who had extensive contact with both Leslie Smith and Jack Odell, and we touched on this very subject. This resulted in the unequivocal statement that no firm production numbers are known (which ties in with what I have heard from other sources).

Thanks for the information Idris! But it is sad that no records were kept.

It's been almost a year since the last post and my calculations are finally done*

Have a look on YouTube at this "Matchbox Toy Cars: How They Are Made (1965) | British Pathé" - a fascinating 2 minute video. I also read an article in the Daily Telegraph (UK newspaper) dated 17 July 2013 which states...."More than three billion Matchbox cars have been sold in the last 60 years..."

So, I made some assumptions. I decided 3 billion was a nice easy number to work with. I assumed they didn't work at weekends so that's 365 days minus 104 weekends = 261 working days. Forget Christmas and Easter! 261 working days x 60 years = 15660 working days. 3,000,000,000 divided by 15660 = 191570 cars made per day. 8 hours in a working day means there were 191517 divided by 8 = 23946 or lets round it to 24,000 per hour. 24,000 divided by 60 minutes = wait for it.........400 cars a minute.
*pinches of salt welcome.

2 years even!

So there might be a few more Rolls-Royce variations for me to find!!

Ghosty.

I don't think many large factories shut down at weekends as to expensive to do - start up would be expensive waiting for hot metal etc so your calculation would have been out a wee bit - add to that the fact they didn't do an 8 hour day and usually ran 24/7 I would suspect - only time these factories shut down was over the Xmas period when regular maintenance was done by those who wished to work the holiday period for extra cash. I maybe wrong but these are the conditions I found working in large factories back then.

I spent the great bulk of last year working for two companies who did lots of business with the Big Three automakers. The Big Three periodically shut down their plants to re-tool for new models. At least two of them had a somewhat longer holiday season than most people did, but that may have been a union thing. I could believe that Lesney didn't have such long periods of inactivity, as they had plenty of models to produce while setting up for the latest ones...but then again, their machinery surely required maintenance. How did they manage to fit that into their production schedule? Hearing how this was done, as related by a former Lesney factory worker, would be interesting.

Returning to the original topic, the production numbers were definitely important. But, as Hugh stated, no firm ones seem to be known. It's too bad that nobody had an eye to the future and preserved any records of them.