I am looking at a project car. According to the owner its a numbers matching 1974 camaro with a 400 SB turbo 350 trans. The car has around 90 Kilometes on it. At first I thought the guy was clueless but with some further checking it seems this car was bought buy the Department of Defence and put into service in Japan.I know how the goverment works now. They could have gone to the COPO and said we want this car but put in the biggest small block you have, not realizing it was not the most powerful.

Anyone ever heard of this? Know anywhere I could find info on COPO's. Most of what I have found was in the 60's. Any clue what something like that would bring Vs a 74 Z28/Type LT.

My first car was 74Type LT and I maymake an offer on the car regardless if its rare or not.

 

Do you have the VIN? That might be the first place to start checking. If it was after January 74 that they made it then it should have factory HEI in it and only around 3200 of those were made out of the 160,000 V8's so that might be something to look for. I don't know about the 400sb in it though but maybe the VIN could lead you in the right direction on tracking down the information.

 

there were no 400 SBs in 1974 so unless he somehow has 100% documentation, I would stay way because if he is full of **** on this, what else is he lying, or not telling you about?

the COPOs were pretty much all gone by then because that was at the height ofwhen the government was killing all the preformance in cars and concentrating on mileage

 

COPO (Central Office Production Order) Is a process to order car that are not standard. They did not start in the late 60's or end in the early 70. Lets say the FBI wanted 10 suburbans with cummings engines in them they would put a request in to COPO. If GM wanted the sale they returned a quote. This office was not limited by normal production guidlines we know about. These cars where always more costly because they would have to assign engineer(s) to write work instuction and check fits. COPO became famous because of the 427 COPO Camaros. GM chose not to make the 427 a standard option.

Example of COPO in the late 70s the old U2 spy planes use to have issues with landing gears. The landing sites needed fast chase trucks to unjam landing gear as the plane landed. COPO filled their need Turbo charged 350 El Camino's. That year GM didn't offer a turbo in anything. I have never seen one of these El Camino's off base. I assume these "special" went straight to scrap. I wish I had one of those bad boys.

I was hoping there was some kind of record of COPO's?
Since this car was Vin'ed in Japan I have no idea how you could prove its number matching or not.

Tracking anything by Vin will be tuff because the car was vin'ed for Japan. It was re-Vin when it came back to US in 1986.

Its on ebay,, here is the link. The owner said he will post pics of the "Matching numbers" tomorrow. I really want a type LT 4 speed anyway

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1974-...QQcmdZViewItem