1964 Malibu SSFisher Body Number Plate - Baltimore, Maryland Assembly Plant (BA)Body plates at Baltimore did not use group option codes or ACC. Body dates of months 1 through 9 were padded with a leading zero to make a 3-character body date. Baltimore did not make a distinction between an inline 6-cylinder engine and a V8 engine with the style number. This means that whether a Malibu SS sport coupe was to be built with an inline 6-cylinder engine or a V8 engine, Baltimore still shows the style as 5837 on the body plate. Baltimore used two blank formats of the Fisher Body Number plate. The first blank was used until the first week of March. The first format blank plate has the text GENERAL MOTORS COPORATION on the first line and THIS CAR FINISHED WITH Magic-Mirror ACRYLIC LACQUER and BODY BY FISHER on the bottom three lines. The words STYLE, BA, BODY on the third line were consistent along with TRIM and PAINT on the fourth line and ACC. on the fifth line. The body date, style year and number, body number, trim code, and paint codes were stamped for the specific car as it was scheduled for production. Baltimore did not use a hyphen character between the year and style number but rather a space such as 64 5837 as well as a space between the plant designation letters BA and the body number such as BA 4476. The body number was not padded with leading zeros so this could be anywhere from a 1-digit body number to a 4-digit body number as applicable for the time and style. Baltimore Fisher Body Number plates changed the blanks around the first week in March. The verbiage THIS CAR FINISHED WITH Magic-Mirror ACRYLIC LACQUER on the bottom was removed leaving only BODY BY FISHER. Baltimore had two unique stampings on their Fisher Body Number plates. Generally stamped above BA was a 3-digit number that corresponded to a job number found on the interior trim sheet. This was internally used and ran from 001…999 then started the sequence over. This number has nothing to do with any options and is of no real significance today except to match the trim sheet (if one is lucky enough to find one) to the car. Also often stamped on the Fisher Body Number plate is either a 1- or 2-digit in any number of locations but generally in the top right or bottom right. The significance of this number isn’t known but it is suspected to be a line or body assembly platform number used for quality control but, again, this is speculation. Numbers ranging from 1 to 8 have been found to date. One April plate has been documented with X1 where the X is stamped over the number 2 giving at least some credence to the theory. Baltimore convertibles did not indicate the convertible top color on the Fisher Body Number plate.
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