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SW “Ohia” |
I traded in 1960s-70s Mopar muscle cars for a few years. The interest in serial number breaks and timing is strong, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line in some cases. I never saw the allure but some people love owning the supposed “first” of something.
Working in manufacturing, things like serial number sequence are often more of a “guideline” than a rule. Like for 1960s Chrysler, if a plant had two assembly lines, the concept was that one would be the odd serial number and the other even, building cars in numerical order. But that rarely worked true, if one line stopped because of an issue, the other sure didn’t. Records are scarce or missing on top of that.
Not to mention mistakes, sabotage, and all sorts of other stuff that happened 50+ years ago that people try to figure out. A relative of mine was a Line Card Setter in a General Motors plant in the 1970s. He typed up the big punch card that hung from the hood and specified the options to be installed in a car. Funny how a friend of his could order a bare bones base model and it left the factory with a tilt column and power windows. THAT is the fun stuff that leads to arguments and articles being written about unusual happenings.
I’ve worked on projects where the actual “first” of something was serialized at a random starting point to prevent competitive intelligence from figuring out certain things like sales volume and production timing. Chunks of numbers would be randomly pulled out for the same reason. Unless there is some sort of legal requirement in the industry that mandates numbers be complete and sequential, they can be anything and everything, even repeating.
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Prototypes and # 1 serial numbers
