The Old Lawnmower Club
Collection, Preservation and Display of Old Lawn Mowers
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F12 - date?

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bugbear Mon, 15/07/2013

My Ransomes Marquid doesn't have it's ID plate any more.

But the engine does (in fact, the serial number is stamped in, so would be difficult to remove).

I have no reason to think the engine is not original, so if I can date the engine,

I'll have more-or-less dated the mower.

The engine serial number is:

F12 02 02 60142

Can anyone turn that into a date, or even a decade?

   BugBear

Forums

wristpin Mon, 15/07/2013

A wild and uninfomed guess!. The hundred and forty second day of 1960?! Now some smart a*** will tell me it was a Sunday!

wristpin Mon, 15/07/2013

Oh well, it was worth a shot!

So assuming that it is just a sequential number maybe some one has access to Villiers build dates?

hillsider Tue, 16/07/2013

 How about this for a guess and it is a pure guess, I have no evidence to support the theory re the build date of your engine.   F12  = model, 02 = Day - it was a Tuesday, 02 = Month - February, 60 = Year - 1960 and 142 = Build number for that shift or day.  Ray.

bugbear Tue, 16/07/2013

OK. I'm a computer programmer, and half a mathmetician.

If (please) as many people as possible could POST THEIR F12 SERIAL NUMBERS, it may be possible to reverse engineer the convention.

This will be entriely reliant on the amount of data we can put together. Since I understand this engine to be common, it should be possible.

   BugBear

wristpin Tue, 16/07/2013

Three serial numbers from F12s all either on or from Ransomes Marquis. I have one more but it's burried in front of the 30" Dennis plus other assorted items so unless it's a deal breaker it's not coming out for the time being!

 

 

 

 

Happy code cracking!

bugbear Mon, 29/07/2013

Oh bugger. That's not good. It looks very much as if the f12-02-02 stuff is a model number (possibly with sub-variants), but that the 5 digit number is a "pure" serial number, that doesn't have any date information encoded in it.

 BugBear