The Registry

[Cormanus]

Thanks Pterodactyl for the lucid explanation earlier. However, if your thesis is correct, the 10th digit of yours, Kevin's and my bikes should have been a consistent A. It prompted me to look again at the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_identification_number]VIN information in Wikipedia. It tell us the 10th digit is the model year.

Kevin's plate


So, Kevin, your bike is a 2012 model manufactured in May 2013.

Pterodactyl's plate


Pterodactyl's bike is a 2010 model year manufactured in October 2010.

Cormanus' plate


My bike is a 2011 model year manufactured in June 2011.

Randy's plate


Randy's is clearly a 2013 model year—both from the 10th number of the VIN and the rather large statement at the bottom of the plate, but we can't see the date of manufacture, although it is said to be "shown above".

I was distracted for a while by the fact that Pterodactyl's mine and Kevin's bikes had K0, K1 and K2 respectively as the 11th and 12th digit and I wondeed if Honda were repeating the "K" designation. However, the VIN article in Wikipedia says the 11th digit is the Plant code and digits 12-17 are a sequential number.
OK, I've an update. Wikipedia is misleading on the 10th digit. Although one has to buy ISO 3779 2009 (which is the international standard for VINs) to read it all, a little bit is accessible [url=https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:3779:ed-4:v1:en]here and it provides the following definition of 'year':

Quote:year
calendar year in which the vehicle was produced, or model year of the vehicle as determined by the manufacturer
Thanks yet again to Google, I tracked down [url=http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/draft-imadali-its-vinipv6-viid-00.pdf]this document which contained the following interesting information:

Quoteigit number 10 designates the year model. It is the year during
which the vehicle has been manufactured, or the vehicle model year
depending on the manufacturer choice .
My underlining

That leads me to the conclusion that Honda has used the 10th digit to identify the year of manufacture rather than the model year. That makes sense of the change in the 10th digit in all of the plates shown in my last post. It also means Pterodactyl is likely right that there was only a 2010 model manufactured in 2010, 2011 and 2012 before the 2013 model was produced for Europe and the US, although it's not clear to me that there was a change between the 2010 and 2013 models. Seems the real new model was actually the one produced in 2014. That said, I'm not sure there's any easy way of determining when there was actually a change in models.

[Pterodactyl_imp]

Wow, well done mate! Your usual erudite self . I think what is hindering the meaning of what we are after is purely semantics. What is a model? For instance HX MODEL Holdens (I had V8 ute) were manufactured in '76 and '77. I regard them as build years of the same model, an HX, rather than '76 and '77 model Holdens. I think the '13 CB is distinct from the '10 model, and was engineered and marketed by Honda as such.

Cheers

[Randy B]

I took that picture before I purchased the bike and I was only interested in the VIN at that time.

Interesting information.

[Cormanus]

Wow, well done mate! Your usual erudite self . I think what is hindering the meaning of what we are after is purely semantics. What is a model? For instance HX MODEL Holdens (I had V8 ute) were manufactured in '76 and '77. I regard them as build years of the same model, an HX, rather than '76 and '77 model Holdens. I think the '13 CB is distinct from the '10 model, and was engineered and marketed by Honda as such.

Cheers

I think you're almost right. Holden (and Falcon for that matter) have always had models which run over a number of years. In the case of this bike I think the difference between the '10 model CB1100 and the '13 model CB1100 was simply that the latter went to the US and Europe. Other than the ability to get the speedo and odometer to display either miles or kilometres, I'm hard pressed to see any difference of note between what came here in '11 and '12 and what went to the US and Europe in '13. If you asked a Japanese who could have bought a new one every year, I suspect they would say there was no 'new' model until 2014 when there was the EX/DLX a 6th gear and a brand new instrument cluster.

My thesis? There was a 2010 model that sold in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and then a new model in 2014.

But, of course, I could be wrong. Oh so very wrong.

[Pterodactyl_imp]

Wow, well done mate! Your usual erudite self . I think what is hindering the meaning of what we are after is purely semantics. What is a model? For instance HX MODEL Holdens (I had V8 ute) were manufactured in '76 and '77. I regard them as build years of the same model, an HX, rather than '76 and '77 model Holdens. I think the '13 CB is distinct from the '10 model, and was engineered and marketed by Honda as such.

Cheers

I think you're almost right. Holden (and Falcon for that matter) have always had models which run over a number of years. In the case of this bike I think the difference between the '10 model CB1100 and the '13 model CB1100 was simply that the latter went to the US and Europe. Other than the ability to get the speedo and odometer to display either miles or kilometres, I'm hard pressed to see any difference of note between what came here in '11 and '12 and what went to the US and Europe in '13. If you asked a Japanese who could have bought a new one every year, I suspect they would say there was no 'new' model until 2014 when there was the EX/DLX a 6th gear and a brand new instrument cluster.

My thesis? There was a 2010 model that sold in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and then a new model in 2014.

But, of course, I could be wrong. Oh so very wrong.

No, I strongly disagree with you. You could be right!

Cheers

[flynrider]

Back in the 90s, I did some contract work for Honda on their manufacturing automation communications protocols. I had to take a quick crash course in Honda's process. The way it was explained to me, the vehicles were manufactured by model year. A model year was defined as a large set of production line specifications (different for each region) that were finalized prior to setting up the production line. All vehicles produced under that specification would belong to the same model year.

What I found interesting was that Kevin's plate indicates that the bike was built to 2012 specs (and according to their NZ website, was sold as a 2012 model), yet built in May of 2013. The interesting bit is that Honda had already built thousands of U.S. and European 2013 models by then. It would seem that Honda set up a line in May of '13 to produce 2012 models for Kevin's region after production of the bulk of the 2013 models for the rest of the world.

I think you'd have to work for Honda to know the reason they did that. One that comes to mind would be that Honda wanted to manufacture more bikes for Kevin's region in '13, but didn't want to go through the trouble and expense of working up a new set of production line specs (probably because it was a small batch). They just reused the 2012 spec.

Whatever the reason, Kevin's plate definitely shows that his 2012 model was actually manufactured after the 2013 models that were built for the Europe and North American markets. Very strange indeed!

[Pterodactyl_imp]

^^^^^ Very informative. Yes, strange indeed. Within models there also seems to be an almost arbitrary choice of detail depending on region. Colours, wheels, ABS etc. Perhaps a large organisation with poor internal communication. Who knows?

[Kiwikevin_imp]

Well Cormanus, all I can say is thanks for all your research and also input from everyone else! I guess I'll just be very grateful I have a bike built in 2013 and not 2012 as originally thought. Makes me quite happy actually.. (I know.. small things amuse small minds) but it might make a difference the day, dare I say it, that I sell it..