[Verne_Frantz]

Greg,
First of all, I need to admit to a mistake in my first post. I had completely forgotten that Baltimore stopped building full size passenger cars in '64. But my data is still accurate if I look at '63. In '64, Baltimore switched to Trucks and Chevelles.
Also, (unfortunately) you are definitely asking the wrong guy about '70 Chevelle cowl tags. I haven't studied them at all. I was only trying to offer a possible explanation for those random misc numbers. On the earlier passenger cars, these numbers are, as yours are, placed in odd locations and at various angles, which indicates to me that they were not punched at the same time as the tag was loaded in the "typewriter" tool used to punch all the other information. It suggests to me that these extra numbers were punched separately using another type of simple tool that was only used for those numbers.
I don't know how many jigs comprised a gate at Baltimore in '70, but I would be very surprised of they only had one per body style. I'm sorry if it seemed like that was what I was implying. In '63 the passenger cars had 7 different body styles. They were distributed in various quantities in the 32 car gate. Also, during the model year, some jigs were changed from one body style to another. For instance, there would probably be more orders for convertibles in May than in December, so Fisher had to adjust the percentages of body styles in a gate to satisfy the orders. I've proven this in my data base by sorting these misc numbers by production sequence number and looking at the body styles as they changed, but with the same misc (jig) number.

The B D numbers are totally greek to me. I can verify however that the earlier cars used cryptic codes for an SS option, as well as for a floor shift car.

The last thing I want to do is confuse things even more, but I noticed your body build date is December, well into full production. So, if your car is a pilot car, then it must have been the first to be built in some new way, or with some new equipment which required new tooling or assembly methods for this mid '70 production release. Was there something "new" released in '70 Chevelle production in the January time frame? Most pilot cars were built 4-5 months prior to production launch, or as close as 2 months before if the model change-over did not incorporate major changes. At least one pilot car needed to be built in each different body style to test the proper fit and alignment of the tooling, and most were built with many options, in order to test their assembly and fit. The "order" to build these cars came from the plant itself, rather than through normal ordering channels. When these cars were completed (and met spec) they were assigned the first VINs. Some were given to plant execs to drive until production launch, then wholesaled to dealers. So, in reality, when the whistle blew and full scale production began, the very first car off the end of the line was not VIN 100001. It was more likely something like 100008.

Oh, and back in the era from where I've collected my data, the Baltimore plant was not the only plant to use these jig numbers. Out of the 12 assembly plants producing full size cars, several of them used this practice.

Just trying to help by comparison to other years that I am familiar with.

Verne.