others may be able to add more, but look around here a bit John and you'll learn how different the auto industry of the 40's and 50's was from aerospace, in '53 they were drawing up the changes for '54, the Task Force series was late to the line, beginning with a "warmed over" 54 as the first "new" truck offered in early 55, the Task Force 55's saw the line about 6 months after most new model years normally would
the assembly manuals were a supervisors tool, initially consisting of a loose leaf collection of instructions, many of which were carried over from year to year, GM had a good habit of using what was already proven and tooled up .... the manuals available from the vendors are a collection that didn't actually exist as a "manual", so no telling what size they originally were, and whoever collated the AD book the vendors offer used what they could get that might be applicable to the whole series, maybe the sheets from May-Aug '53 where what they could find, and as production usually started late summer of the year preceding the model year, those drawings would actually be for the '54
some of the TF assembly manual is dated '54, but the bulk of it is dated early '55, and all of it is really only directly applicable to the 55 2nd series truck, not including any '56-59 changes, especially the body changes in '58 - it's possible they weren't even fiddling with clay models for the TF trucks in mid '53 .... there are other instruction drawings that are rare which are called "running changes" that would have covered those few differences, some of those can ocassionally be found at literature vendors
one thing that affected that sort of factory-only documentation is that somewhere/ sometime along the way there was a fire at some GM facility that saw a lot of older documentation lost - might be why there's no assembly info for the previous series, '41-46 or the earliest AD years
Bill
