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All thanks in advance for your help. Recently acquired as 63 swc with a non-original engine and am looking to decode and engine casting number and stamp #'s. I am fairly certain the J43 stamp would indicate a casting date of October 4 of 63. What i need help with the second series of number on the engine stamping T007RE.
Please offer any help you can.
yes it is the matching engine for 64 L76 02616, and in his rush to be first to reply to your query, someone failed as usual to answer your question. The date stamp of I007RE has a faint F in front of it, obscured by the orange paint.. Alpha font I was used in place of numeral 1 on date stamps from Flint foundry. If you are inclined to, you can remove the orange paint, very carefully, using good paint remover, or lacquer thinner by rubbing with a soft rag. Don't scrape the pad with any tool, other than perhaps a plastic paint scraper.. Use nothing metal on the pad, as you will damage its fine original surface.. You want to preserve the broaching machine marks that are fine as frogs hair.. Here is a similar pad from engine a couple months later than yours..
Wow, you have incredible eyes, I see nothing at all in front of that "I" on the suffix stamp. If it is there, somebody poured a huge glob of engine paint on top of it and filled all the stamp indentation completely. That will take a gallon of lacquer thinner to remove. Good luck with that.
If you blow it up and enhance it a bit, you can see the shadow of an F, but then the E looks like it used to be an F (wouldn’t make sense to change it as RF is the FI engine).
I can see the very faint F (increased sharpness), but it's really odd to me that every other character in both stamps is so deep and easily read.
Here are others right around 10/7/63 which all show much more obvious Fs.
Compare the shapes of the two 0s and the R to the 10/09 stamp — they look like great matches to me. Just odd the Fs are so different. (The 10/01 stamp uses the same 0s but reversed positions!)
Last edited by barkingrats; Jan 26, 2026 at 10:00 PM.
Thanks for the help. One other item i was looking at was the difference in tachometers that were used in 63. Mine redlines at 7000 others i have seen online redlines at 5500. What is the correlation between tach and engines size and or hp ?
I would suggest a new thread for that question but in general as you might guess, low hp motors with pump up lifters had the low redline tachs, and high hp motors with mech lifters had the high redline tachs. All motors in 1963 Corvettes were 327 ci.
engine Stamp
