66/67 Chevelle COPO?

[jeffschevelle]

Short answer is there are no known provable (or even barely credible) examples of any 66 or 67 Chevelle being factory built with a 427, and no known records of any such car being built (or of any suffix for a 66 or 67 427 of any horsepower fitted with a Chevelle oil pan and exhaust manifolds).

If it HAD happened, then I would expect the car to have no rear panel SS emblem, and no grille SS emblem, because there were no "SS427" emblems in existence at that time that would fit on a Chevelle for the factory to install. (Similar to the 69 COPO cars' absence of SS427 emblems.) As far as I am aware of, there has never been a single one to show up that way, and certainly not an unrestored example.

Any urban legend of a guy who worked at a plant being able to get a car built with a 427 "on the down-low" would have to explain how he also got whomever supplied the SS396 emblems to make ONE set of SS427 emblems for that car. Or alternatively how he got the Fisher Body plant to produce and install a 66 rear tail panel that had holes for the Malibu/SS trim strips and the "CHEVELLE" emblem but no holes for the SS396 emblem, or a 67 rear tail panel that had holes for the Malibu/SS trim strips but no other holes at all.

Every 66 Chevelle SS with an alleged "factory" 427 that I ever saw before Trim Parts starting making SS427 emblems for 66's, had a rear panel emblem made by cutting the 396 off the two S's, and installing the 427 part of a 67 Impala SS427 fender flag beneath it. (There were at least three of those in the early 70's roaming around the town in NC where I grew up.) But it would have been pretty darn hard for the factory to install an emblem during the 1966 model year that did not even exist yet! Plus the issue of getting Fisher Body to put the holes in the right place.

Lastly, the one 67 Baldwin Motion 427 car that was built started life as an L78. If a 427 COPO package had been available, you'd think they would have just ordered that instead. And even that dealer-built car had the emblem problem - early pics show grill emblem removed, and SS396 emblem still in place on the rear panel. Then at some point later someone hand-made a rear SS427 emblem for it. It is a big chunk of an emblem, quite thick, with huge bosses on the back for screw-in studs. They had to drill giant holes in the tail panel for the bosses to stick through, and then use spreader type brackets over the studs to hold it tight to the car. I have had that emblem in my hands and it feels like it weighs a couple pounds! The guy restoring the car was going to toss it and install a new Trim Parts emblem. I told him he would be crazy not to have that weird one-off emblem replated and put it back on the car. But I digress ...

I would be very happy to be proven wrong some day and have a verifiable real 66 or 67 factory 427 Chevelle surface. But until then, I will stick to: No such animal !!