1963 Body Build Date vs Car Build Date

[Bob H.]

Body date is 1st week of March. (G1) Car Build Date is March 1st. Did they run that close together?

[Harry S.]

Yes, My 63 conv. is H3 with a build date of 4/20/63.

[Mark F.]

Bob,
Per a John Hinckley post way back when and Larry Galloway’s C2 Book, they said:
as a rough count, the total system at Corvette was less than 200 units…[Larry Galloway’s book refines this to a 157 line job count],…and producing 112 units per day on 2 shifts (roughly 6 units per hour), it would have taken about a day and a quarter [some say up to 1-1/2 days] to go through the system from the Body Shop to the Shipping Gate.

So, if your car was far enough thru the body and paint shop assembly processes, but just before the Trim Tag attachment station, it could have gone thru the rest of the assembly process all in the same day – even if it lopped over to the 2^nd shift…

[Jack M.]

I only have a small sampling of 1963 Trim & Vin Tags. There are four different G1 Trim Tags (3 coupe - 1 convertible)... and according to an online calendar, all the VINs fall between the BEGIN # and END # dates for March 1st production.

Date	Day	Begin #	End #
Mar 01, 1963	Friday	109815	109911

http://www.stl-vettes.com/65Vette/bday.htm

[Michael H.]

The birthday on various website are for reference only per NCRS National Judging Chairman. We had a car that had a birthdate per a website of March 9th but the build date was March 5th.

Mike

[Jack M.]

I agree that some birthday websites are close, but not totally accurate. I believe this particular website coincided with the 1966 Judging Guide daily build data, so I was hoping it was also accurate for other C2 years.