[William]

Having had access to a Chevy dealers records I've spent more time than contemplating this than is prudent.
The sequence of events was: the dealer order, acceptance of the dealer order by the factory, schedule & build of the unit. Three possible outcomes to the submission of a dealer order: immediately accepted & scheduled for production, not immediately accepted, rejected. A fairly basic coupe order is one that would likely be immediately accepted because all components were in continous production and certain to be available. From there several factors come into play. Hot selling models are generally allocated with certain dealers getting more than others. A dealer that was allocated 5 Z/28s per month would acknowledge & receive shipment long before a dealer with a lower or no allocation. Orders were delayed or rejected due to material shortages or engineering holds. I'm sure many people tried to order a JL8 Z/28 shortly after '69 introduction, not possible. Further along in the process I believe orders were grouped by body color and zone location for shipping purposes.

Here's an example. The dealer ordered 7 Camaros beteween 10-19-68 & 10-25-68. The order numbers were NDB083-NDB089. NDB083, 087 & 088 were Z/28s, the others were std production models. The std orders were accepted immediately and assigned BDY numbers of 185961, 187881, 187882, 195835. Many weeks passed before the Z/28 orders were accepted: NDB083 2nd week December, BDY # 226652, NDB087 early February, BDY # 262697, NDB088 early March, BDY # 286543. Here's the VINs for these cars, all ordered in the span of 1 week. NDB083 N584728, NDB084 N547404, NDB085 N545947, NDB086 N544300, NDB087 N603712, NDB088 N623253, NDB089 N559632. N623253 was ordered October 25 and took 24 weeks to build.

I've noticed an effort to correlate BDY #s with COPO production. Since most were ordered in groups it is no suprise that those numbers are often in sequence. But the VIN sequencing they seem to have is the result of an axle shortage revealed in an article about COPO production in MCR. Orders were held until axles were shipped. If the plant received 50 BE axles, 50 orders were released and built.