Production Date Mystery - can you help?

Can you help me with a bit of detective work?

Is there a way of telling the actual production date of my Elf, or close to it?

Clues and red herrings!:

I applied to British Motor Heritage Trust for a Heritage Cert., to quote from their email "Unfortunately the build record for your vehicle is missing, we are therefore unable to produce a Heritage Certificate for this vehicle."

It doesn't look like a 'bitsa' (as far as I can tell) because most of the bodywork is original.

A member of the Riley Club, who has the identical Elf to mine, says his was produced in June 1969, and said "I have been told by a couple of people that the brown colour was only applied to the last 100 cars made - can't say how true it is, but mine is June 1969, so fits in with that theory".

On the registration docs it says 'Jan 69' but I think this is a default for 1969.

So I have been researching the car reg's on Wikipedia, and it seems that the G suffix which mine has was from 1 August 1968 – 31 July 1969. So mine must be between Jan 69 and July 69, but that's as close as I have got so far.

I've applied to the DVA for the list of registered owners to see where that gets me. At this stage I am not even sure whether it was first registered in England or Northern Ireland, I assume the former.

So if anyone has any batch numbers, or any further information that can help me narrow it down, I would really appreciate it.

I think Chuck Heleker's your man for this. He helped me sort out the fact that mine's a 67 even though it's registered '69.

Thanks, hope he'll drop me a note if he sees this.

Simon's records are more complete than mine and mine are best during the Mk I/II era, but I may be able to get you close if you send me the chassis number. cheleker at aol dot com
It is interesting that Heritage couldn't help. Just because they do not have a record of your number, if they have the one before and the one after, even they can figure out the build date. It is likely they are missing a block of numbers but they should be able to get close. They may not be able to issue a certificate, but try them again to see if they can get close to the build date.

Will email you shortly. I did, I think, reply and ask why that might be, but they didn't reply. If I don't turn anything up this way I might try them again.

The closest numbers I have are Oct '68 and Mar '69. Doing some interpolation, I estimate your car was built early to mid-February 1969.

Chuck

Well that is a massive narrow down from what I've figured out so far! Thank you very much indeed!

ETA - if anyone can help me to narrow it even further, I would be delighted.