Hello!

64 Dart 270 said
Well this might sound like a long winded answer, but here are my thoughts. First off, you would need to know if it was a factory 225 with a 4 speed manual floor shift. You can tell this by decoding the body tag aka fender tag which is the plate on your drivers side inner fender. There is a line with ABCD... on the tag. There will be a 1-2 digit number under the AB positions that signifies your engine code. For a 65 it looks like 20, 23, and 24 are codes for different versions of the 225 engine. Then your transmission code will be under D. For a 65 it looks like 3 is the code for the 4 speed manual floor shift option.
As for the production numbers, here are my thoughts. First off, I'm relatively new to this and there are certainly a lot of people on this site with a lot more experience than me. Secondly, I have an issue with the book I have which makes me question if it's 100% accurate. The reason I say that is I have 2 64 dart convertibles. One was made at the Hamtrack MI plant and the other at the Newark DE plant. For 64 body tag decoding this book has a different set of rules for decoding the fender tag based on the plant, although for 65 it just has one for all plants. So maybe each plant had their own in 64 and then in 65 they standardized. But for 64, the book lists the decode rules for all the plants, except the Newark plant. I wrote a nice email to the author to ask about this discrepancy, but got back crickets so far. So that makes me question the source material being reporting in the book. For example are the productions number totals directly from Chrysler for the whole model year (in which case they would be accurate), or did Chrysler report by plant and the author is summing those totals and if so and he's missing some plants what does that mean. Maybe that's just me overthinking it. In any case, I just find looking up the data interesting. If it's something you really want to know more about there are some people out there that for a charge will do all the research and certify the results.

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Thanks again for your valuable time. I think the pictured tag indicates a “20” under the AB confirming the 225 engine, a “3” under the D, also confirming a standard shift 4 speed vehicle. The information I read would translate that the vehicle was delivered Feb. 23rd and the production number was 00078. The V45 indicates conv. The trim “P4X” indicates black interiorand the paint code of HH1 would be a copper poly, kinda like a dark burnt orange or oxblood. Please advise if you agree or if I am way off base. Also, if you have any info on the persons or providers for further investigation on the origin and certification of the vehicle. I believe the vehicle to be an original numbers matching vehicle, even though its a slant six I would like to do a nice restoration and the confirmed originality would be a positive step for me to invest a big chunk of time and money