While trying to get some brake work done i noticed the Build Date on the inside of what i am calling the backing plate. Probably the wrong name for it.

I was surprised to see it after all these years.

Do people include this in their restorations?

Some people do add this to the restoration along with the ones on the trailing arms and engine tin.

I always assumed those were part production dates, not tied to the car they were installed on. But they could have been stamped when the part was installed on a car...

I'm ordering all sorts of stamps in the next couple weeks to start adding these to all my work.

Thats the thing that surprised me. 3/26/74 is the build date per the chassis number in the trunk.

That's great confirmation that they are in fact meant to be the car's build date.

They're just stencils cut from cardboard or something like that, then a swipe of a paint brush over the stencil & easy to change dates daily & to quickly put them onto parts, tins, trailing arms, etc.

So it's easy for you to copy the print/font from the marking, then make a stencil from a thin cardboard (art supply stores, Staples, Office Despot/Max, etc.), & to match color with an enamel paint, in order to recreate them in a resto.

PS - You can use tracing or sketch paper to trace the numbers, then spray adhesive lightly on the back of the sketch paper to adhere it to the cardboard to cut-out, then use an Xacto knife to cut out the stencil in the cardboard/chipboard or even thin plastic sheet (must be resistant to the paint solvent though). (We used to do that technique to build cardboard & foam-core models of buildings & site topography.) For stenciling, you'll want thin board so the brush painting can more easily fill in to the edges & in corners.

Jeff Bowlsy's 914 site' Plates/Labels/Markings subsection has an extensive catalog/pix of them, as well as in the O&H Forum's "The few, the rare..." nailed topic, as references for you.

IMHO, you should either preserve the originals & touch-up parts as needed, or recreate them as above in any resto - documenting with pix of them all prior to starting of course - for both your reference, & for documenting their originality later.

If you're doing a resto mod, engine &/or suspension swap, etc. - then you may not care now, but it may add value later for any future use/resto/back-mod-to-original/etc. In that case you could either resto or preserve the markings, or just save the old original parts with markings, & source new ones for the resto-mod/swap build.

Good Luck!
Tom
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