There are many manufacturers of equipment, past and present, that embed codes or use unique combinations of numbers in particular places in the serial number string to designate the year of manufacture. In these cases our team of analysts uses UCC filings to determine the most accurate cutoff points possible.
In some cases, because of the system a manufacturer may use to assign numbers, it is necessary to assign an arbitrary cutoff to the range of numbers for a given year. Numbers are listed lowest to highest for known numbers assigned to machines in each given year. The format of the Serial Number Guide follows the standard practice of listing serial numbers either by a machine’s make and model (and in some cases, Caterpillar being one, by serial number prefix) or by its manufacturer only when one set of numbers covers all categories and all models in a product line. The use of this exclusive source of information makes this Serial Number Guide the most comprehensive resource available. Also, an extraordinary effort has been made to verify, categorize and interpret serial number data from several million records of UCC filings.
