The only number you will find is on the engine block, just below the water inlet. There is a table that will tell the year/month of manufacture, from that. If indeed that is the same motor if was built with.
also stamped on the frame rail, pass side, visible when you remove the floorboard. This is a 27. Not sure what year they started doing this
From the department of Justice Archives While component parts have had somewhat limited protection under 18 U.S.C. §§ 511, 512, and 2321, that is not the case with the actual public vehicle identification number (VIN). While all "road" motor vehicles are required by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 115 (49 C.F.R. §§ 511.115 and 565.1 - 561.5) to have a VIN, this requirement was phased in over several years. Starting on January 1, 1969, all passenger cars manufactured in the United States or manufactured overseas on or after January 1, 1969, and subsequently imported into the United States were required to have a VIN. See 33 Fed. Reg. 10207, July 17, 1968. As a practical rule of thumb, this means that every passenger car from model year 1970 to date has been required by the Department of Transportation (DOT) to have a VIN. Until January 1, 1980, the VIN's characteristics (i.e., its length, the types and kinds of information encoded within particular positions or sections of the VIN, etc.) for passenger cars could be determined by each manufacturer. https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm...ive-date-motor-vehicle-identification-numbers I've never seen a count but up into the mid 50's a lot of states used the engine serial number simply because of the philosophy that if the engine died the car was dead and done. A truck I have that has an Oregon title from 1984 still shows the engine number as the vin number.
Pedantics.... If the lady at MVD asks for the VIN for a car that was made before VINs existed, you have to give her a number, because they don't have a special form for older cars that says "vehicle serial number" or "engine serial number". The term VIN means different things to different people at different times. Get over it.
A DMV professional told me, as he was looking in his VIN bible, that Ford started stamping the serial number on the frame as well as engine sometime during the 1926 year. He could not find the number on my frame though.
I find that late '26 with the rear crossmember that has the lower reinforcement "lips" is about when they got numbers stamped on frame. If the rear crossmember is a simple channel, then probably doesn't have numbers on frame. Dave
The Jalopy Journal
