1934 Body Number??

[Tom in TN]

Howdy,
Is anyone familiar with ’34 Ford body numbers? Are they ‘car-specific’, like serial numbers?

I want to put a Body Number plate on my car, but I have no idea what the number should be. The plate I bought has –LB- right in the middle of the blank area.
I found a number “8b0 3b4I” that I think is from a ’34.

My car is a 1934 DeLuxe 5-window coupe’ and it’s an old hot rod, so probably no one but me and some 34 Ford expert would ever try to match the number…tempted to put “BR-LB-549” on it and be done with it.

Thoughts?

[Kurt in NJ]

Ford built body's didn't get body tags
The number starts with the number prefix for the year, then body type, then numerical order of production of that body

The body plate on my 36 convertible sedan starts with
68 (for36)-740(convertible sedan)--4256
On the plate it would look like this example for yours

40-770-xxxxx

[DavidG]

If your coupe's body was Murray-built rather than Ford-built, it would have a plate numbered as Kurt has indicated. Neither 8b0 3b41 nor BR-LB-549 are '34 Ford body numbers.

[pj's junkers]

Are you sure the B and I are not the Ford six and one?

[JSeery]

My first question would be what makes you think you body had a body plate in the first place? And my second question would be why would you want one on a Hot Rod? That's normally the type of stuff that is removed (if it was ever there in the first place) to improve the appearance of the firewall.

[DavidG]

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With respect, there were not a lot of '34 Ford sixes built, only fours and V8s.

[blucar]

It could be that Tom in TN is overly thinking the body number issue. The lack of body numbers on EFV8's is an item that has been well documented for many years. ONLY THE BODIES THAT WERE OUT-SOURCED BY FORD HAD BODY NUMBERS, which would mainly be open cars and maybe station wagons.
I am the second owner of my '36 coupe, I have owned it for 66 years. For many years I wondered why my Ford did not have a body number on the right side of the cowl, above the heater location. I had the car for about forty years when I found out it was not supposed to have a body number, that made sense because there were no holes where the tag would have been. The paint on the cowl of my car is original Ford, so I know the holes have not been covered up.

[DavidG]

Some of the closed car bodies were not made by Ford, but rather by Murray and those did have body number plates, but they are definitely in the minority judging from survivors.

[34fordy]

Originally Posted by DavidG

Some of the closed car bodies were not made by Ford, but rather by Murray and those did have body number plates, but they are definitely in the minority judging from survivors.

My 34 Fordor has the plate but whatever was there (painted numbers?), is not visibly readable anymore. The plate is smooth and was never stamped. I do not know how to determine who manufactured the body. Frame # 923XXX.

[TonyM]

Originally Posted by blucar

. ONLY THE BODIES THAT WERE OUT-SOURCED BY FORD HAD BODY NUMBERS, which would mainly be open cars and maybe station wagons.

Closed bodies farmed out by Ford had body tags. Here is the body tag found on the firewall of my unrestored 1937 Ford Fordor De Luxe. We think the body was produced by Murray.

[DavidG]

That's typical of a Murray tag. Some Murray tags had the letters 'LB' printed in center of the lower half as cited above at the beginning of this thread and it seems as nearly all or all of the reproductions have those letters on them. They stood for 'LeBaron", the famous custom body builder who like all such builders fell on hard times after 1929 and were acquired by and became a division of Murray.

[JMFL36]

My '34 Phaeton has 2 small holes in the slanted part of the cowl above the patent plate, so I assume it originally had a body number plate there. (See photo 1.) Among the paperwork that came with the car is an old car inspection report that lists the car's serial number as 750-3616. (See photo 2.) This, of course, is not the serial number, which is actually stamped on the driver's side frame rail near the steering box. But I suspect this number (750-3616) to be the original body number. 750 for the body type - Phaeton, and 3616 as the sequence number.

So I have 2 questions for the experts out there:

1. Do you agree with my logic that 750-3616 is likely my car's original body number?
2. Is there anyone out there that stamps body tags like the original ones? (Like photo 3.)

Thanks in advance!

[DavidG]

Given that '750' was the designation for the phaeton body type, your logic makes sense to me.


In my previous posts on this thread last year, I screwed up. Please substitute 'Briggs' for 'Murray' wherever I wrote it.

[V8ER]

A jeweler can engrave the tag.

[Charlie Stephens]

Originally Posted by 34fordy

My 34 Fordor has the plate but whatever was there (painted numbers?), is not visibly readable anymore. The plate is smooth and was never stamped. I do not know how to determine who manufactured the body. Frame # 923XXX.

Any chance you are looking at the plate that lists the patents that applied to the car? See the left hand picture in post #12 for an example. How about a picture what is left of the plate?

Charlie Stephens

[rotorwrench]

I don't remember what year or model but I've seen body numbers stamped on the floor support cross member just in front of the seat on some old Fords. That may have been in the model A days. Briggs and Murray built cars for Ford for a long time. Clarence Avery, that was running Murray, had worked for Ford way back in the model T days. He is credited with figuring out how best to run Fords first moving assembly line. He left Ford after he and Charlie Sorensen had tired of working together but he still got along well with Henry and Edsel.

[DavidG]

'32 bodies built by Briggs and Murray and their Canadian counterparts had body number tags riveted to the first front cross sill immediately behind the #2 wood floorboard. They were located near the front of the sill on the right side. Some Ford-built bodies had body numbers stamped in that location (no tags) preceded by a letter denoting the assembly plant. That practice was not universally adhered to by the plants with the result being that Ford-built bodies with stamped numbers are the exception rather than the rule, unlike the Briggs and Murray built bodies.


Canadian Ford-built bodies usually had a body number stamped into the firewall.

[TonyM]

Originally Posted by DavidG

In my previous posts on this thread last year, I screwed up. Please substitute 'Briggs' for 'Murray' wherever I wrote it.

So this is a Briggs body tag?

[DavidG]

I can't edit any of my previous post except the most recent ones, which I've done in the one you've highlighted. Murray remains correct in the first sentence in post #11.