Once again great stuff thank you but very sorry im a kiwi and not a service man I only just realized what you ment by thanks for your service. My user name I picked for a local trade site here in nz when I was a teenager. Appoligies if its misleading
See what happens when we assume stuff... All Good, We Like Kiwis too....
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BTW SO = Shipping Order Number, Also called the VON Vehicle Order Number....
Here's an explanation typed out back in 2014 by none other than 69Coronetrt
Here's a real rough example of how the VON is assigned for non-special order (i.e special paint), package (A12s, Daytonas, Superbirds, etc ) or other specialty VON (Police, taxi, dealer demo, etc) cars for 1968 and later.
December 15th. Regional Zone rep walks into dealership with Christmas tidings for the GM and Sales Manager of the dealership. Drops of a bottle of the owners favorite scotch. "Oh by the way, we've added some new options to the order sheets. Here are your new order pads. Start using them after the first of the year." Hands the order pads to the SM. Each pad has fifty order sheets for a Charger.
January 2nd. SM hands out the pads to salesman Bob. At the top of each pad is a six digit number; aka "the VON". The first sheet of the first pad is numbered 000001, the second is numbered 000002, the third sheet is numbered 000003 and so forth for about 50 sheets to a pad.
January 3rd- Customer comes in to order a new Charger. Bob sits down with sheet 000001 and fills out the order. Turns it in to the Sales Manager.
January 4th- Different customer comes in and orders a Charger exactly the same as the first person. Bob fills out sheet 000002 and gives it to the Sales Manager.
January 5th- Sales manager forwards all order sheets to the regional office. Sheets are sent to Headquarters and routed to plant. These two order sheets wind up at the Hamtramck plant. Orders are sorted internally and scheduled for production. At this point, the only unique identifier to each car for billing and scheduling the car is the VON. The VIN has not been assigned yet.
(alternatively, Bob is told to order some stock for the lot. Bob uses order sheet 000001 and 000002. He's in a hurry, is not creative and orders two cars alike. Turns them in.)
Sally at Hamtramck is in charge of assigning VIN numbers to cars. Sally has a stack of papers on her desk. She knows all the orders are there. Bill comes by and distracts her. The orders get knocked off the desk. She picks up the pile of papers and puts them back together roughly in the same manner but 000002 winds up on top of 000001. Any consecutive order of the order sheets at this point is irrelative. As long as she enters the orders and assigns a VIN, she's good. So car 000002 gets entered and assigned a VIN. She then enters the order for car 000001 and assigns it the next higher VIN. As long as the order was entered and a VIN assigned, she's done her job.
The orders get routed. The cars are built. Since they are going to the same end location, they try to keep the car production together to save on transport costs. So...the cars are built at roughly the same time so they can arrive at the dealership at the same time. They are not built sequentially.
One would expect to find consecutive VONs from the same dealership because the order pads would be numbered sequentially. As pads were disseminated from a regional office in somewhat of a large series, one should also expect to find similar VONs from a certain region.
At a recent car show, I saw a VON on a car. The owner knew the car came from Texas. Four cars down I saw a car with a VON ~200 larger from the first car. I asked the second owner if he knew the history and we ultimately determined his car came from the same region as the first, which is why the VONs were so close together. The dealerships could have been miles apart and received different pads but the VONs on the pads were in close proximity.
Hope this makes sense.
Oh, and since you asked about pictures of Doug's Coronet R/T you get a picture of my Coronet R/T.... Shameless Self Promotion....
