[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by robz

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a hand stamping and what's different than the rest of the tag's stampings??

The data tag is stamped by machine, all of the digits and letters at the same time.

Hand Stamping is when someone else has come along after the fact and manually (ie, perhaps with a hammer and a "punch") wacks it one more time to add these additional digits.

I am familiar with hand stamping with respect to VINs, on the frame or engine block, to correct a mistake made by the automated equipment (usually the offending characters are "X"-ed out and the correct numbers hand stamped back in). I am not familiar with hand stamps on data tags and would only be guessing if I offered an explanation.

Sweetjudge - the ones you were looking at; were they stamped from the front or from the back?

K