I would be willing to bet that somewhere on a TR6 the commission number
(VIN) is stamped in some not-so-obvious location. Almost all cars have
their VIN numbers in a secondary location as well as the public location,
including older British cars. Way back in the late 1970's, I was working in
a bank in Phoenix, and we had a customer (I can't remember his name!) who
was a retired former head of the Arizona DOT. He was a car buff and had an
incredible knowledge of car identifying numbers and their locations on all
sorts of cars. He was hired by the Barrett-Jackson and the Kruse auctions
to authenticate the cars that were being offered at the big classic car
auctions to make sure that the paperwork matched the numbers on the cars.
Quite often he resorted to locating secondary numbers when something looked
amiss. I remember that he said that even Model A Fords had a secondary
number stamped on top of a frame rail. Well, anyway, about that time I
found a '63 Austin-Healey that I wanted to buy, but the car was sort of a
junkyard dog and I was a little suspect of its authenticity. I asked the
former DOT guy if perhaps Healeys had a secondary number stamped somewhere.
He said, "Of course" and told me to carefully clean the weld at the top of
the RF suspension tower and that I would find the commission number stamped
into the weld with the numbers spaced very far apart. He was right! I
would never have noticed it if I hadn't known to look there, but the number
was definitely stamped into the weld and I wound up buying the car. Anyway,
he said that there were books with all that information in them but they
were very tightly controlled, and that (at least in those days) only a few
people in his department had access to that information. But, anyway, that
experience leads me to believe that if we could find someone who either was
a higher-up in a DMV office somewhere or who authenticated cars for one of
the big car auctions that they could tell us where secondary numbers are
located on TR6s. Once you know the correct VIN (commission number) then
the British Heritage Trust can supply you with all the rest of the numbers.
Rex Townsend
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