Open the hood of most 1960s Chevrolets and look at the firewall on the driver’s side, near the brake master cylinder. Riveted there is a small aluminum plate covered in stamped letters and numbers. That is the cowl tag, also called the trim tag or body tag. The cowl is the panel it sits on: the part of the body between the hood and the windshield.
Fisher Body, the General Motors division that built the bodies, stamped one for each body to tell the line how it was to be finished. Decades later it is the closest thing a classic GM car has to a birth certificate.
Reading one
Layouts changed by year and by plant. This tag is made up for illustration, in the layout of a 1967 Camaro built at Norwood, Ohio:
04C BODY BY FISHER ST 67-12437 NOR 110655 BODY TR 760-Z R-2 PAINT 3L
- 04C
- Build date. Two digits for the month and a letter for the week. Work on this body started in the third week of April.
- ST 67-12437
- Style. The model year, then the body style number. 67 is 1967. In 12437, the 12 is Chevrolet Camaro, the 4 is the standard interior and the 37 is the two-door coupe body.
- NOR 110655 BODY
- Body. The plant and the body number. NOR is Norwood, which numbered its bodies upward from 1 through the model year. It is not the last six of the VIN.
- TR 760-Z
- Trim. The interior color and seat style. 760 is black with standard bucket seats, and the Z says the buckets have no headrests.
- R-2 PAINT
- Paint. The body color, then the top. R is Bolero Red. The 2 is a black vinyl top.
- 3L
- Options. A group number and a letter for each option that changed the body. Group 3, letter L is the Rally Sport package.
Other years and plants arrange the same facts differently. The Camaro Research Group publishes the full tables for 1967 to 1969 Camaros, and the clubs for other models do the same for theirs.
Why restorers care
The tag answers the questions that decide a classic car’s value. Was it born this color? Is this the original interior? Is the body style right for the trim? A repaint, a color change or a swapped interior shows up as a mismatch between the car and its tag.
It has limits. The tag describes the body. It says little or nothing about the engine and transmission, and it is not the VIN. Tags can also be reproduced, so serious buyers look at the tag, the VIN plate and the paperwork together.
Other makers, other tags
The idea was not unique to GM. Ford riveted a data plate to the driver’s door. Chrysler screwed a fender tag to the inner fender under the hood. Today the build record lives in the manufacturer’s database, keyed to the VIN, and the stamped plate has become a printed label.
Why we took the name
A cowl tag records how one particular car was built. That is the whole job of selling replacement parts well: not “a headlamp for that model” but the headlamp this car left the factory with.
Cowl Tag Auto Parts sells replacement parts for modern vehicles, where the VIN does the work the tag once did. We took the name because the principle has not changed. Our own tag is on the About page, and you can read how we use the build record on How we match parts.