Original dealer info for 1st gens is available

[vtfb68]

  Mark,
 My scheduling # is J 543, and the assembly plant # is 39094.
    Victor

[KERR]

i got mine today,

for you number guys,   i still haven't figured out how you all come up with all this info by looking at number,  i guess your related to rain man   
05/14/1969   vin 9N643537

[69Z28-RS]

i got mine today,
for you number guys,   i still haven't figured out how you all come up with all this info by looking at number,  i guess your related to rain man   
05/14/1969   vin 9N643537

OK..  here's the way you figure production date from VIN.    Your Norwood Camaro was seq no 643537.   that falls during May 1969 production based on the CRG information here..
http://camaros.org/geninfo.shtml#HowMany

Apr-69    9N637106  13519     The Last VIN produced in April was 9N637106; there were 13,519 Camaro produced that month
May-69   9N650323  13217     The last VIN produced in May was 650323; there were 13,217 Camaros produced that month in Norwood.

your number, 643537 was the 6431st Camaro that month.    ie.   6431 of 13,217 during May.   There was 21 work days that month, so Norwood produced an avg of 629 Camaros per day.   13217/629=10.22, so yours was likely produced on the 11th work day, which was the 15th of May.    The calculation was only a bit over 10 (10.22), so it's possible that it was produced on the 14th (which is what your report showed you).   The calculation will generally get you within a day or so..

[BULLITT65]

"Thank you Mr. Wizard."
Gary has a good handle on how to calculate the day your car was produced. (He calculated mine almost to the day!)

Maybe we should call Gary the N.G.R.S....

[69Z28-RS]

*L*  ... you can add that to all the other thing I've been called.. 

You can use the same approach to calculate approximate build date for other cars you own, as long as you know the monthly production numbers for the plant.

[flyingskibiker]

My results were: purchased 11/21/67 at dealer code 258 in zone 31 at Hood Motor Co. Inc. in Fort Walton, FL.  The NCRS website has an address of Shell and Main Street.  They say the Preston Hood Chevrolet is the same business and is still in business.  I contacted them via their website.  They said that they don't have any old records...  BUMMER!

Anyway, I don't have a trim tag.  It wasn't there when I bought the car in '83.  My calculations were that it is an 11C car.  Seems about right...

[JohnZ]

your number, 643537 was the 6431st Camaro that month.    ie.   6431 of 13,217 during May.   There was 21 work days that month, so Norwood produced an avg of 629 Camaros per day.   

There are some holes/errors in those Chevrolet-provided numbers, as the line speed never changed - Norwood built 912 per day, every day, even if it took overtime to do so.

[69Z28-RS]

John, 

I've read where you said that before, and I'm not doubting you..  I'm just using the data (by month) that CRG provides us.

For the 912/day to be true... the month end totals would have to be off by *several weeks of production* if true.... and there would have had to be a LONG shut-down time that summer of '69 before they resumed production...??    I recall reading in some car mags back in 69, that salaried employees ran production for awhile.. during an 'hourly' hold out or ??  and if so, their production rate would have surely been less...    Can you shed any light on that?

[KERR]

awesome! 

[Kelley W King]

I did the math on my 08E 69 by the CRG site and it worked out to the 25th. My NCRS papers say the 28th. Pretty close I think.

[JohnZ]

John, 

I've read where you said that before, and I'm not doubting you..  I'm just using the data (by month) that CRG provides us.

For the 912/day to be true... the month end totals would have to be off by *several weeks of production* if true.... and there would have had to be a LONG shut-down time that summer of '69 before they resumed production...??    I recall reading in some car mags back in 69, that salaried employees ran production for awhile.. during an 'hourly' hold out or ??  and if so, their production rate would have surely been less...    Can you shed any light on that?

A lot of those magazine articles were "fairy tales", written by folks who had no clue about how manufacturing plants operate; salaried employees didn't man the line and build cars. How many cars do you suppose 100 salaried guys could build, replacing 4,000 hourly assemblers spread across 16 miles of conveyors? None - it's a fairy tale.

[Mark]

Don't forget starting April 19th Norwood was building Firebirds as well as Camaros, that probably where the other 250 cars per day went.

[69Z28-RS]

Don't forget starting April 19th Norwood was building Firebirds as well as Camaros, that probably where the other 250 cars per day went.

Mark,  if the 912/day included Firebirds, then that would explain the qty discrepancy; that thought occurred to me after John's previous post, but I had no Firebird information.

Does anyone have any idea how Norwood coordinated production of Camaros and Firebirds simultaneously?  ie..  intermixed..  or run firebirds for a day or more then Camaros??  or?   If we have no factual information for how that was done, then the uniform distribution of Camaro builds across the production days of the month would still provide the best estimation for a specific production date.

[JohnZ]

Does anyone have any idea how Norwood coordinated production of Camaros and Firebirds simultaneously?  ie..  intermixed..  or run firebirds for a day or more then Camaros?? 

They ran Camaro and Firebird intermixed, at a constant ratio. If you kept changing the ratio, every time you did that you'd have to re-balance labor operations and re-assign/re-train every worker in the plant. The ratio was developed based on volume and demand projections, and hardly ever changed.

[69Z28-RS]

Thanks John...