A friend on mines son is 19 and has a 57 1 ton pickup. He got it about 2 years ago from Cali. It still has the black plates on it. When we were working on it one night, I took a look at the VIN number and noticed something interesting. The truck is serial number 0009! It was built in Cali and there all it's life up to the time it came back here. What I'm trying to see is if anyone knows of a 57 pickup with a lower serial number. This is just for our personal curiosity. Also if anyone knows of a good 55-57 pickup forum, I would be glad to hear about it. Thanks
www.67-72chevytrucks.com there is a 47-59 forum on there. Probably pretty rare! I would do the 100 point resto on it, and run it through barret jackson, then you could buy 3-4 more with some cash left over....
I don't know how Chevy did it, but I would bet the sequential numbers kept right on rolling if it was a 1/2 ton, 3/4 or 1 ton. If that is true, it could actually be the first 1 ton of the model year from that factory. Might take a lot of leg work to find out, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Oh, and pics please!
I am just guessing at this, but I would suspect that each plant had 0001 to whatever the final # produced... I know on a p***enger car vc57j1234 would be a 57belair v8 fron janesville wisconsin, and I ***ume that there could be a vc57o1234 that would be a 57 belair v8 from the oakland california plant... maybe squirrel knows?
I also think that they used a 6 digit sequential number at each plant. so the VIN will tell you the plant code, I ***ume it's L since it was built in California. I think the cars and trucks ran on parallel lines in the same plant (from pictures I've seen like this), so it's likely that the cars had one series of numbers, and the trucks had a different series of numbers...so that truck would have been the 9th truck built in LA during the 1957 model year, probably in September 1956. Look for a date stamped on gage cluster.... I'm ***uming the number is something like 3G59L000009
Thanks for the replies guys. Squirrel, I believe you are correct. It's a lot of zeros with a 9 on the end. The truck is remarkable rust free and the plan is to keep it completely stock. Some parts were missing such as the road draft tube and other small ***orted parts, but those have been replaced. It has a 235, manual trans. and 4.56 gears in the rear. It still has the original wheels as well. The only thing that has been obviously changed is the rear bumper. That is easy enough to fix though. Personally, I think the coolest part is that the truck is owned by a 19 year old. When his father asked him what kind of car he wanted when he got his license, instead of some foreign ****, he said he wanted a "cool old chevy truck". So they looked and found this one. The involvement of young rodders is rare these days and GREAT for the hobby!!
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