Invest In Classic Cars Wisely – What To Look For

By: David C. Atkin

First of all you need to learn about the car, learn every nut and bolt, know it from the ground up, once you have learned all about the the car you can get in to the hunting process, this is the fun parts of the process, this is where you put your knowledge to work.

I’m sure that if your interested in classic cars you’ve heard the term by the number, or numbers matching, you need to know how to read these numbers because they’ll make you, or break you when it comes to investing in cars.

There nothing more important then the numbers, these numbers that you hear about all the time will tell you everything about the car your looking at, these numbers are your best friend if your going to invest in classic cars, the numbers are what I’m going to talk about here.

The first and arguably most important number is the vehicle identification number, or (VIN code) this number can tell you a lot, but it can’t tell you everything, vins for different manufactures will tel you different things about their cars.

Take for instance a vin plate on your 1960’s camaro reads something like this 124379N109876, this code would break down like this.
The 1 denotes the manufacture of the car, 1 being Chevrolet.
The 24 denotes the Series of the car, or engine type, 24 being 8 cylinder.
The 37 denotes the body style of the car, 37 being two door coupe.
The 9 denotes the year of the car, 9 being 1969.
The N denotes which facility the car was manufactured at, the N means Norwood Ohio.
The 109876 denotes the this was the 109876TH car produced on this day at Chevrolet.

What you need to know:

1.The third digit would tell you if the cat had a V8, if that digit a 3,6, or a 4 it had a V8.
2.The fourth digit indicates the body style, 3 for coupe, 6 for convertible.
3.The sixth digit indicates the year of the car, 7=1967, 8=1968, 9=1969.
4.The seventh digit indicates the production plant, N=Norwood, L=Van Nuys.
5.The last six digits indicate the line number, this number would rise by one with every car built at these two plants.

The vin code needs to match will all the other numbers on the car, like the rpo code, the transmission tag, and the rear end tag, if your looking for factory original to make an investment in classic cars, it a must that the numbers match perfectly.

The rpo code will tell you things like what engine, let’s say you’re looking for a 1969 Z/28 camaro, the suffix, or end of the rpo code would have a “DZ” indicating that the car has a 302 with 290 HP, which is the only engine that the Z/28 came with in 1969.

The rpo code would also tell you if the car had an automatic, or standard transmission in it from the factory, it will tell you the application which would be a 1969 Z/28 Camaro, and in most cases it would tell you if the engine has four bolt mains or not.

You’d also need to know the color code break down for 1969 is your looking for a 1969 Z/28, below I will add the factory color codes for the year 1969.

Code 10 is Tuxedo Black
Code 40 is Butternut Yellow
Code 50 is Dover White
Code 51 is Dusk Blue
Code 52 is Garnet Red
Code 53 is Glacier Blue
Code 55 is Azure Turquoise
Code 57 is Fathom Green
Code 59 is Frost Green
Code 61 is Burnished Blue
Code 63 is Champagne
Code 65 is Olympic Gold
Code 67 is Burgundy
Code 69 is Cortez Silver
Code 71 is LeMans Blue
Code 72 is Hugger Orange
Code 76 is Daytona Yellow
Code 79 is Rallye Green

Keep in mind that the more you know about these cars, the less chance that you’ll lose money, they gain value with every year that they are on the earth and this will never stop, on Chevrolet you also have a protecto-plate that needs to be decoded.

For this article I won’t go in to the protecto-plate, but don’t fail to learn about it also, and on the engine you’ll need to decode the casting number to make sure that the engine in your car is the one that belongs there, it needs to match the rpo code.

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