I'm not sure how useful it will be, but mostly for fun, I put together a website to automatically decode maverick/comet VINs. If you're interested, it's at: http://mav-vin.mystreetmachine.com I'm pretty sure it works correctly, but please let me know if it doesn't.
That's pretty neat. It does have one tiny 'loophole'. I gave it a 'fake' VIN and it gave me the information on a car that would have been impossible to be real. Yet, it never said "This does not compute", "No Such Beastie" or "ERROR". I gave it 0F93F123456 No 70's were made in Dearborn, No 70 Grabbers has '93' VINs and the 302 wasn't available until 71. I'm not trying to be picky, but it may mislead someone if they make a typo or provide an inaccurate VIN. Is there anyway you can 'exclude' certain parts from certain years or make the data year-specific?? I also think you should subtract 100,000 from the "Unit Number" as the first serialized car was actually 100,001. It's just my two-cents, and please don't take it personally. I think it's great that you built a decoder! I just think it could use a check and balance to ensure the info provided is applicable.
What Paul says is correct, but I imagine at least some of the exclusions necessary to prevent one from decoding a fake VIN would be extremely difficult to implement... For instance how could the decoder determine if say 1K93F101234 was invalid when the 302 wasn't available early in the '71 model year but is valid after what consecutive VIN(first on Paul's list is 149312)?? At this point no one knows what the first VIN is for the V8... Same for the 250 6cyl in '70, again not avail till late in the run...
Paul and Krazy Comet, thanks for the feedback, it is definitely appreciated. Making the decoder exclude all the invalid combinations will take a fair bit of work, particularly the ones Krazy Comet pointed out. I was actually aware of the simpler ones, but I didn't think it really mattered since presumably people would be decoding a real VIN. But Paul's point that it could provide misleading results from a typo is a fair one. I'll try to put some time into improving that. I did not understand that the unit numbers started at 100,001, I will definitely fix that.
Got another fu-fu... 1972 Comet 2-Door Sedan Standard or GT Engine: 302ci 8-Cylinder 2 bbl Plant: Kansas City Unit Number: 459,368 Mercury builds start at 500001, so mine is 59,368 not 459,368
Ah, so comets are numbered differently. That's another little detail I failed to grasp. That's fixed now too. Thanks, Krazy.
