Hand-Engraved Shelby VIN Plates

Notice the subtle difference of the engraved VIN nomenclature between the VINs on car #0003 and car #0029. The hyphen is before the paint code. Cars #0003 and #0018 were the first two (2) '67 Shelby GTs completed at the airport facility on October 19, 1966, and are the only two cars known to have this 'day-1: hyphen before paint code' nomenclature.

There were only 20 cars completed by Shelby American between October 19 and October 31, 1966. More than half of them still have their engraved VIN plates, leading us to conclude that only the earliest cars were candidates for this 'feature.'

Shelby American had initially planned to carry forward the VIN nomenclature previously used in '65 & '66, e.g. "SFM7S xxxx". This is evidenced by early factory paperwork and a pair of 'sample' VIN plates. Two sample 7S nomenclature VIN plates were retained by Chuck Cantwell, the '65/'67 project engineer. Cantwell passed these plates on to collector John Atzbach. Later obtained by Dr. Brian Glover in 2020, and currently under the care of Brian Styles.

It is believed that shortly before the '67 launch, a decision was made to change the VIN nomenclature. This required that the VIN plate stamping machine (in the parts department) would need to be retooled. The retooling wasn't completed before the earliest-completed cars, so they improvised by hand-engraving the VIN plates. It is further believed that once the VIN stamping machine was retooled, Shelby American mailed stamped replacement tags to dealers (as somewhat of a 'recall') to swap out for the engraved tags found on the very early cars. Cars #0003 and #0018 likely didn't have their VIN tags swapped out for stamped versions since they went straight to FoMoCo in Dearborn, MI and Oakville, Canada, respectively.
 

Reviewing The Data

The "V.Pic?" column indicates whether or not if we have a photograph of the Shelby VIN plate on file. If we don't, this information was obtained second-hand (from another source). Absent a photo, the SRG can not independently verify the information.
 

Related Documents

• Memo - VIN Nomenclature (October 31, 1966)
• Memo - VIN Length Change (November 10, 1966)
   
  

See Also

• Ford and Shelby VIN Decoders
• Earliest Cars Built, Serialized, Completed
• Production Gantt Charts - Shelby American
• Consigned Cars