[unruhjonny]

Originally Posted by FASTASSBIRD

Claims no vin, even has the paint scrapped off where you’d assume it would be. Personally I’m betting it’s a GTO block and the vin is stamped just under the head like the other WS block I have at home.

umm, where?

I have a 1972 WS (GTO/Lemans) block which has a painfully obvious faked vin stamp... wrong font, size, and missing a character...
Maybe it was faked because it wasn't where a prior owner was told it was supposed to be!?

[FASTASSBIRD]

Some judges and GTO’s (Fremont built I believe) had the vin stamp horizontally (kinda) directly under the passenger side cylinder head. Pretty sure it was the Fremont plant that did it. If you want to see a picture, pm me and I’ll email it to you. I can’t for whatever reason post pics from my phone.


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[FASTASSBIRD]

For the record, that WS block has EUN 636146 however the casting date is absolutely unreadable.


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[poncho-mike]

I had an odd 1970 Trans Am as well.

In 1987, I bought a one owner 1970 Trans Am with 70K original miles on it. The car came from West Virginia, and was very rusty. The owner had spun a rod bearing and had removed the engine with the intention of turning the crank and putting new bearings in it. He got into a bind before having the work done and sold me the car and all of the parts.

I have no doubts about the originality of the car. The components on the engine (heads, block, intake, exhaust manifolds) were all dated within a few days of each other. The carb was a little bit earlier, as was the alternator. The starter was a big question. The dates on the starter indicated it was a 1970, but the last four digits had been stamped over and were unreadable. This car was extremely original, the only non-original item on the car was the distributor. At some point, the previous owner replaced the stock points distributor with an HEI. It even had the original radio installed in an uncut dash.

I stashed all of the parts for this car away after dismantling it thirty years ago. Within the last few years started selling some of my extra parts and this was one of the cars/parts I decided to get rid of. I advertised the engine and a local guy from NC contacted me about buying it. We met and he checked out the engine, which is when I noticed there were two things that didn't add up. The first was the lack of a VIN number on the block. The VIN was nowhere to be found, and we checked near the head and on both sides of the timing chain cover. The second thing was the mismatch between the cast dates on the engine and the dates on the rest of the car. The engine components were all dated first and second week of March, but the cowl tag showed a date of 07A (first week of July). The original JWs were dated 5 25, and the rear end was dated late April.

I am positive the engine had not been changed since the guy had a packet of receipts and the original documentation from when he bought the car. I knew that one of the front fenders had been changed and it had been repainted at some point. I was recently going through the paperwork with the car and found documentation showing the front fender and door damage from a car backing into the owner in a parking lot. The car was on the rough side, so I parted it out.

I can't explain the four month differential between the engine and the car. I junked a lot of early T/As over the years. If you look through past posts, I had a YE 4-bolt 455HO block with no VIN number stamp. I never had the body on that one, so I have no idea how the engine cast date correlated to the cowl tag. But over the years, I have encountered three blocks with missing VIN numbers. I've encountered engines with the VIN number one digit off. I've seen 1970 T/As with small and large rear sway bars. I can't explain the difference in dates on this car. If the engine was defective and the car was pulled from the line to get a new engine, I would expect the engine to be dated late relative to the car. This is the opposite.

Any ideas?

[unruhjonny]

Originally Posted by 70TA-RAIII

I've got 2 pretty original 70 Trans Ams. ...
My ... 06B car has a 1270 dated carb.

John

This thread had me thinking again... and this time I remembered to do something last night when I was home about it.

I actually have three '263 carbs (the correct application number for my car);
The first one, is an original assembly line carb, and is minty - I got is as a part of a parts deal, and it was acquired by me freshly restored from a (now folded up) Portland Oregon shop...
I has a date code of 2139 (Aug 1, 1969)
I acquired a second unit, it is a service replacement carb.
Then a couple years ago I made an arguably stupid move, an bought a member's carb which was purported as not being able to run right...
The date of this carb is 1260 (May 6, 1970).

My car is a 06A car, so my guess is this is pretty darn close to being correct for my car/engine (block April 30th, heads April 22nd & 29th, intake May 14);
I am guessing that a carb with a slightly earlier date code would be 100% correct* - but for now, it looks like I might be sending this one off to Cliff...

* = my guess is based on a higher volume of L78 engines would mean that the date codes will appear to be slightly different than the lower volume L74 engines.

Can added vaccum lines be properly plugged, and hidden after recolouring?
I believe I plugged it with lead, but am gueesing I will need to pull the lead out before sending it to Cliff...

[unruhjonny]

well crap sandwich with cheese...

i'm in the garage right now, and I happened to realize that 1260 carb WASN'T my third '0263, but in fact a '0262... poop.
the third '0263 is infact 2749.

scratch my prior post.