Classic Camaro, Chevelle and Nova factory documents emerge

If you own a classic Camaro, Chevelle, or Nova, getting a missing piece of history on your car is about to get a little easier. The National Corvette Restorers Society has announced that they will begin selling shipping records for these three models made between 1962 and 1972.

That might not seem like a huge date range, but it covers a pretty large sweet spot in terms of these nameplates' popularity and collectibility. These records will include the dealer name, dealer code, build date, and dealer address, all details sought by owners and restorers who want to verify and to document their cars. And records like these can highlight the difference between a fakey-doo and the real McCoy.

Chevrolet is a bit unique among Detroit manufacturers when it comes to records of its cars made before 1975. While most other contemporary surviving marques' records (and we're not talking about Avanti here) have been well kept and are generally easy to find, some Chevrolets have a number of record gaps. In fact, build records for early Corvettes have not always been easy to find, and records for some Corvette model years are incomplete. Given the money being thrown at the hottest Chevrolet muscle cars, having access to build records can make or break a car's value -- and will help eliminate the problem of, say, 105 percent of a certain special edition's examples surviving into the present day. The reason for the absence of some Chevrolet build records is rather mundane; GM's bureaucracy kept them on paper and on microfiche. The task of preserving hundreds of thousands of build documents was a thankless one, and many build and shipping records are believed to be irretrievably lost.

Jay Ramey
The original build and delivery records have been scattered among many paper and microfiche sources, but are now being converted to digital form.

The NCRS will begin offering Camaro,

By Jay Ramey