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1

Decoding/Numbers / Sales receipt VIN only number off

« on: August 23, 2013, 06:43:55 PM »

Hello all-
     I ended up looking at an advertised "SS 396", only to find out that the seller himself had been duped when he bought the car 10 years ago.  I was pretty close to buying this car, so my caution has increased with each car that I look into.  The latest is an advertised 2nd owner SS 396.  I have attached the pictures that I have questions about.

1)  something seems to be weird with the cowl tag rivets...all of the things listed on the tag do seem to match the car though.
2-4) The dash VIN, engine partial VIN, and protecto plate VIN are all the same.  My concern is, the original sales receipt has the words written on it "Serial Number", and then a valid 68 VIN that is not the same as all of the others.

Can anyone explain this?  Everything else seems to match on this car, although I am waiting to hear back about the transmission and rear axle codes.

Cheers,

Cole

2

Decoding/Numbers / True SS?

« on: July 26, 2013, 12:33:28 AM »

I'm brand new to the forums, but seeing as I'm thinking about buying a 68, here we go.

I have contacted a guy about a 68 "SS".  He bought it from a dealership, and I just found out some weird stuff.  However, some of the numbers seem to check out, so I wanted to get a feel for your opinions.  Here's the story...
The current owner bought it from a dealership, and was told the following story.  A previous corvette collector had this car in California.  It was stolen and the VIN ripped off.  The car was later collected, but a California law prevents the highway patrol from reattaching a VIN tag, and so it was issued a CHP VIN.  It sounds like a pretty convenient story if you ask me, but I actually talked to the dealer who sold it 9 years ago, and he assures me that he knew the owner, and everything was as described.  Even though this seems fishy to me, I got some numbers from the owner to see if I could check it out some more.  What I got was
VIN: 124378L341669
Engine partial VIN: 18L341669
Engine Code: T0304MY

From that (as long as the numbers aren't faked), it looks like engine was assembled a couple of months before the car (engine assembled March 4, last VIN for May was 342086).
He lives far away from me, but I'll be heading there this weekend, and I'll be able to get more numbers off of the car.  Are there specific numbers I should be looking at?  Any thoughts on this?  The title is clean.  Does anyone know if there are ways to verify a police report from something like this?
Much Thanks