Finding another early VIN & Engine Sandcast is exiting, with both of them being under the 100 mark. I always appreciate others opinion even when they differ from mine and I have learned a lot from others perspective through the the years. I am always digging for facts, so when CBman mentions the VIN directory as a source of information, which is the only source of published Sandcast Vin's available to my knowledge, it shows some important and interesting facts.
18 of 100 frames have been entered from the first 100 Sandcast or 18% of the possible combinations of frame and engine match-ups, but we know all these were not factory pairs. 3 of the engines are 6x numbers now, which is the highest ten number range group of numbers recorded under the 100 mark. Engine 64 is in frame 33, and Engine 63 is in Frame 81. Frame 81 and 33 have a delta of 49, so having an engine and frame off by a delta of 53, in the case of VIN 7/E60, is not that uncommon when we compare all the combination to other know VIN/E combinations in the first 500 Frame/Engine pairings.
The directory overall contains less than 6% of the Sandcast frames produced and approximately 7% of all the engines of the 7414 Sandcast produced, so statistically we still know very little about the entire production run of Sandcasts. I wonder if we will ever discover and have a VIN directory that reaches 10% of the entire Sandcast production run.
I think we place too much emphasis on many of the lower VINs because they are unique and they bring more money than the higher VIN combinations. We have discovered a higher percentage of the lower.VINs on the site, yet at this time the 6000 VIN frames are the rarest of all the frame ranges with only 4.1% of these 1,000 frames produced being entered in the VIN directory.
I am still of the opinion we don't know how these Frame and Engine combination were paired, the facts show at this point in time, we have not confirmed a single Frame and Engine number matched exactly coming out of the Honda factory, so I think as time goes by and the value of these bike increase, we will see additional numbers being registered. The registry is important to all of us as we all use it as a reference point when evaluating characteristics from different VIN ranges.
Provenance for every Sandcast is an important part of authentication and pricing for all of us who love the Sandcast.
IMHO, we still don't know, what we don't know. Look at how much we have learned from 10 years ago and some of the assumptions we made back then are no longer valid. Let's keep digging into our Sandcasts and posting new discoveries.
Duane