Victor Brown's car is an anomaly. The records I have show only odd numbers from chassis number3002 thru 3460 from Berlin. We know that 3000 series chassis were stamped out in 1963. The chassis number is the 6 digit number stamped on the firewall. The year of production is the year stamped on the VIN plate. Years of production are all over the place and are close to the year the car was first sold.
Amphicar Corporation of America called cars assembled with 6 digit vin numbers as early cars and cars with 9 digit vin numbers as late cars. This change happened as cars were being assembled in late 1964 and early 1965. The letter I have dated Jan 12, 1965 calls these cars early 1965 and late 1965 models. The letter also states "The easiest method of identification in the warehouse is, of course, the change in the facia or chrome on the window surrounds"
Many 6 digit cars with lips, such as Marc Schlemmer's car (3127), were assembled as early as September 1964 and are on inventory sheets I have from Sept 1964. (3391, 3427, 3429, 3435, 3441 etc)
My records show that these early 3000 6 digit series cars stopped coming in late in 1964. It may well be that these 3000 series cars were on the top of a pile of cars or in the way of 2000 series cars and had to be assembled and shipped to make room.
Without making this posting a "book" you all should know that the first 280 or so of the 9 digit cars came over with the first vin numbers such as 103620001 thru _ _ _ _ _ _ 280. When they realized that they would run out numbers after 999th car they re-stamped and the VIN plates. They dropped the last 3 digits and added 652 after the second digit. 103620001 became 106523620. If you look at John Bevin's vin number page on the IAOC site (
http://www.amphicar.com/goodies/vin_numbers.htm) you will see vin 103031212. They did not re-stamp that car which should have been changed to 106523031.
I hope this helps --- my records are mostly old "union skin" copies which do not scan well enough to be made into a searchable PDF.
Allan
'66 red