Thank You!

Carefully scraping away the spray bomb I believe I found the missing 3rd ink stamp on the RH side. Remnants of the ink stamp appear to have stuck to the white "O". When comparing the other stamps the orange is the same color.

I also carefully scraped away the spray bomb surrounding the tag. I'm hesitant to use a reducer here but luckily the manual method seems to be working for now.

A lot more work to do! Shout out to Darrell and James for the inspiration to do this type of work.

Lots of dirty work in a restoration/preservation job. I always dread this and it's hard to get started, but once I do, I'm OK. I usually end up looking like the car used to by the end of the day...:grin:

Slowly chipping away. Here's progress around the heater cutout and cleaned up the tag a bit. My eyes need a break.

Pretty sure that's a "L78" and "102" markings...

Denis that seems to be the consensus. Once seen it can't be unseen lol.

I'm told the 102 means it was the 102nd car in the line that day which corroborates with the orange PBT stamps as it was early in the 1st shift.

I'm also being told that this was sometimes found in the lower valence. Well here is my lower valence. (Image flipped for easy reading). I now need to confirm that the lower valence is original to the car.

I've discovered "1 02" also on the lower front valance!

Here is a photo with all the numbers wet showing the white numbers more pronounced. Does anyone know what the other 2 numbers/characters mean?

Is the 102 the assembly sequence number?

That's what I've been told. And there is evidence that contributes to this. My car has orange stamps which indicates 1st shift and the 102nd car would certainly be built during first shift. There is another "survivor" car with a number over 500 in the lower valance and the PBT stamps are green, thus the car was completed during 2nd shift. I think it would be cool to gather enough data points regarding possible sequence number and color of PBT stamps to prove this theory once and for all.

After more chipping I decided to give the gel evaporust a shot on the firewall. Still need to clean it up and hit it again.

I avoided the 102 mark and the center of the firewall as I still need to figure out the marks in that area behind the distributor.

I plan to use a multi color flashlight to help reveal what the markings are in the dark. Up close I see multiple X's but when the flashlight gets here I'll see if I can get those marks to reveal themselves.

In the meantime here is a progression shot. Still a ways to go.