LA built 69 Camaro Stamp Pad Pictures
 

I'm heading out next week to look at some cars and a couple of them are 69 Camaro's built in LA. I need some quality pictures of LA Stamp Pads to compare with the cars I'm looking at. I have some idea of the peculiarities of those stamps but need pictures for comparison. I would appreciate any you could pm or email to me.

Thanks, Howard

Re: LA built 69 Camaro Stamp Pad Pictures
 

You need pads from cars and engines that were made the same day as the ones you are looking at to do a really good comparision. Engine pad stamps were changed every day, VIN stamps changed frequently.

Re: LA built 69 Camaro Stamp Pad Pictures
 

The date and application coded would be the same from Norwood to LA since they both came from the same engine plant. As far as VIN stamps from LA, most I have seen for Camaro's have a mixture of letter heights or font sizes. It looks like the line workers picked the stamps from a box of mixed up numbers and placed them in the holder where as the Norwood plant, all the numbers are the same size. And, of course, the VIN stamp would have an "L" for Van Nuys or an "N" for Norwood.

Paul

Re: LA built 69 Camaro Stamp Pad Pictures
 

I'm particularly interested in the consequtive vin stamp. I have lots of pictures that contain assembly stamps from Tonawanda and both Flint Plants.

It's doubtful that I would have a vin stamp from the same day as a particular car I'm inspecting. I prefer to obtain enough pictures to build a "library" of characters and fonts that were available to the workers who stamped the parts. From this known set of characters and numerals you can then compare other stampings to determne their validity.

Paul,

I have noticed those same anomalies in the few LA stamps that I've seen, but I've only recently started to collect Camaro's due to lack of cars with quality paperwork.

Re: LA built 69 Camaro Stamp Pad Pictures
 

The engine stamps are the same on the same day. The stamps were broken down at the end of the day and then refilled with new numbers for the next days production. Granted most of the time they only changed the last digit for the day of the month, but not always. Sometimes the 1's are replaced with an I, sometimes not. As far as LA having different character heights in the VIN stamp, yes they do during certain time period, but they also have the same height and shape characters alot more frequently. It does help to know what the characteristics of the individual letters and digits are, like did Flint use 3's with a flat top, or a curved top and if they used both, when did they use each one, what days were I's inserted instead of 1's, when did they use the various shaped D's that are on DZ blocks, etc. but unless you can compare a known engine assembly stamp directly to what your looking at it is still just a guess. Might be an educated one but its still going to be a guess. Theres a lot of scumbags out there restamping blocks, and some do a pretty good job at it, while others are satisfied with a set of Harbor Freight dies.