Manx Club

As Joe mentioned in his trip report on the Bugorama, while I was there yesterday, Bob Hoover showed me the serial number on his Manx 2 which had a serial number higher than and a date later than any Manx 2 that I had listed in my article. My article said June 70 was the last month Manx 2s with 10 digit tags were made but I've since had a chance to check the registry and see that there are several other Manx 2s with 10 digit serial numbers listed which were made in July and August 70.

I'm still in the process of double checking the totals but I can see there are at least around seventy more Manx 2 than I had listed. I've tried to figure out how I missed all those and believe that when I went through by hand and transcribed the numbers onto notebook paper and added them, I believe I just left off my last page.

When I get the numbers rechecked, I'll put someting on here and send something to Anita for the Mania. If anybody has seen anything else other than this that doesn't match up with what they have, please let me know by posting it here.             

I've had a chance to go through and count the Manx 2s in the Registry
from July and August 70. I took the totals and ran the formula and it
says there were 48 made in July and 34 made in August. That
means there were a total of 418 Manx 2s with 10 digit tags (82 more
than I said in the article). That also raises the total of original
Manxes made to 4308.

As I was going through the registry I
realized that though I had counted Pre-tag Manxes, 10-digit Manx 1s,
10-digit Manx 2s, 4-digit Manx 2s, Utility Manxes and Resorters, I had
skipped one other kind of Manx.  I omitted the ManxVairs, which had a
different set of serial numbers, not included with the others. So that's
the next thing I'll look at.           

So I just counted up the ManxVairs in the registry with tags and ran the formula. The earliest one is CC101L8 and the latest is CV145K9. The formula says there were 49 ManxVairs made. That also raises the total of original
Manxes made to 4357.

As I was just going through counting ManxVairs I saw that even though I already included Resorters with 4 digit serial numbers in the total, I omitted the ones that had 10 digit numbers, so that's the next thing I'll look at..   

So I just counted up the Resorters with 10-digit tags in the registry and ran the
formula. There were 9 in the Registry, the earliest one is R0011B9 and the latest is R0069E0. I ran the formula and it says there were 77 Resorters made.  Bruce recalls that there were 75 Resorters made, so I'm pretty satisfied with the accuracy of the formula.

Just to be clear, this doesn't include "Turista/Resorters" with 4-digit tags which were probably made after Bruce left the company and which I already included in the total of 4-digit Manxes in the article 

Adding the 77 Resorters to the total raises the number of
original
Manxes made to 4434.


Unless anyone can see any other original Manxes I overlooked, I believe that's the grand total. I'll be sending an addendum with revised numbers to my article, to Anita for the Mania. 

Thanks CairoManx for all the research work.

I got a question emailed about the article so I decided to also share it here: I read the latest newsletter (good job!) and had a question on Neslon
Sparks' article on VIN's, or manx id #'s.
If you could forward this mail to him that would be great.
I have a manx (i'm registered in the club).
The ID plate shows #1393, so i think it might be a manx2, but the chart for manx 2's only shows 3 digit #'s.
The ID plate is from Fountain Valley. Any build info will help thanks in advance!


John Malvaso

Hi John, I had to try and keep the article from going too long so it might be a little hard to follow. The article talks about 4-digit serial number Manx 2s and other models on page 12 of the newsletter. Earlier Manx 2s had 10-digit serial number tags. The first five digits are the real serial number, followed by the date and the color codes. 10-digit Manx 2 serial numbers always begin with the the letter A followed by an 0. To keep the chart as simple as I could, I omitted the A and the 0 from the first two places. That's why the 10-digit tag Manx 2 chart shows 3 digit serial numbers on the chart.  The last Manxes had 4-digit tags(like yours). All Meyers Manxes which have 4-digit tags are considered Manx 2s. Like the article said, the 4-digit serial numbers were just issued as the bodies were made, regardless of whether it was a Manx, Tow'd, SR, Utility or Turista. The very first 4 digit tag was 1001 and according to the formula I used, the very last was number 1682. Because the first tag (number 1) was 1001,  I had to subtract 1000 from all the 4-digit numbers to make the formula work. I can't say what month your Manx 2 was made, but I believe the first 4-digit tag was issued in Sep 70 and the last was on 13 august 1971, the day the Fountain Valley factory closed. BTW, the tag is just a body serial number tag not a VIN. I don't know of any state that would accept it as a VIN.

Dang, I didn't get my issue and missed this.



--louis

Louis - I have an extra copy that I can bring to OBX for you.  Tom

Thanks I would appreciate that. I thought I had set my PayPal account to auto renew my membership but I guess it didn't work and I missed that issue. I am all payed up now.



Thanks,



--louis

I just got my Winter 2011 Manx Mania issue and the chart with the revised production number estimates is on the back cover. The good news is that all the omissions from the original article which I mentioned in my posts earlier in this thread(Manxvairs, 10 Digit Resorters and Jul and Aug 70, Manx 2s) have all been added and the totals have been revised accordingly.



However, the bad news is that I managed to leave off the Feb 68 Manx 1 production numbers, which was the first month Meyers Manx was produced with a tag. The original article did have Feb 68 and like it said, the serial number of the first Manx with a tag was number 1401 and a total of 109 Manxes were produced that month. Even though I left Feb 68 off the new revised chart, the total number of Manx 1s shown on the new chart is still correct: 2026.



I also want to restate that in the absence of any original factory written records, this is my own personal and totally unofficial estimate for the total number of Meyers Manxes produced, and the estimate is based on the data published in the Manx Registry which has been laboriously compiled by Winnie Meyers over the last 15 years. So, my personal totally unofficial estimate for the total number of (original US made) Meyers Manxes produced is: 4,432.



I also want to request that if anyone has or knows of any Meyers Manx that has a tag number that falls outside the ranges I've published(like Bob Hunter did), please let me know so I can revise/correct my data and estimate.



Nelson Sparks