Yes, after I wrote what I did about the VIN I realized it'd be a little hard to stamp part of the VIN on my Muncie unless the number was known at that point, so assigning the VIN to the car obviously wasn't the last thing, but if it was the first thing it seems odd that the build sheets didn't have the VIN on them. The build sheet tracked the car by sequence, job and body number and must have been the internal tracking for the car, if I knew how to figure out the codes it probably explains all the options as well.. From a manufacturing point of view I guess you don't need a VIN to track the car down the line if you have something else to track and explain the options it should be built with.. It leads a person to believe the VIN meant nothing to the manufacturing plant building the cars as they had an internal system of sequence and job numbers to track the build.. It was only when the car shipped out of the plant did it start to be tracked by the "DOT" system of a VIN..
Based on the 400,000 plus engine sequence number on my block and the fact I have the Protect-O-Plate off the other Baltimore plant GTO that was built 3,000 or so V8's after mine, yet the engine sequence number is almost 60,000 off, if it is a running number it would almost have to include engines from other plants.. How many engine plants supplied engines for Pontiac? How many V8 engines did Pontiac sell or manufacture in 1966 in total? If there isn't engine sequence number duplication within a year for V8's and it really is a running total, knowing the total number would help to see if 400,000 plus engines would have been manufactured by March of the build year (again this is specific to my GTO)... I'll have to dig up those articles from the very old GTOAA monthly news-letters, but I could have sworn the guy was in the Pontiac plant and he even talked about building engines there.. If every plant built there own engines then that means the engine sequence number could have all ready been stamped, but they would of had to stamp the letter code at time of assembly. I might believe this too, as my sequence numbers are stamped by someone that cared a little more then the the person that stamped the WS.. Now if this was the case, the build sheet had the "tracking numbers" to build the car as it was suppose to be built and the plant added the engine letter code and that code was what they needed to get the right engine in the right car -- what possible reason would a plant need to have the engine (foundry) sequence number for any tracking? It does shows up on the Protect-O-Plate, however, so they did feel it was important to have for warranty type reasons. Makes it very hard to believe they'd stamp out the plates and never record the information on that plate and keep it somewhere.
It really does seem like someone on this board would know someone that worked at some plant back then and have some clue of when numbers were stamped and where they may have been recorded.. Maybe even someone at a dealership, wouldn't they want to recorded the information for the same type of warranty reasons?
Happy Holidays!
Rich
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