[DavidG]

The location mandated by Dearborn management was for the number to be stamped on the left hand side (three places for passenger cars and one for commercial vehicles and trucks) whether or not the vehicle was LHD or RHD. That practice was pretty well adhered to by the U.S. assembly plants for both domestic sales and exports, including RHD vehicles, and on vehicles produced for domestic sale by Ford of Canada. The right side location was used by some of the Canadian subsidiaries (which were all of the British Commonwealth country companies except those in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland), most frequently in the case of Ford of Australia and Ford South Africa where the local capabilities included some manufacturing and/or assembly.


As indicated above, Ford of Canada-manufactured engines were serialized in batches with their own unique system with either a C18 or CB prefix followed by another letter prefix and then the letter F if destined for a RHD chassis and then a number of up to four digits. The four-cylinder engines manufactured in England at the time used the U.S. serialization with a B or BF prefix and numbers assigned by Dearborn in batches from the U.S. series. (There were no V8 engines manufactured outside of North America at that time.)


Despite the Dearborn mandate and the Ford of Canada normal practice, exceptions abound both in North America and abroad in terms of the exact location where the engine number was stamped (apart from it being on the left or right side) and its degree of completeness with regard to the engine's prefix. (Note that the Dearborn mandate specifically stated that only the forward-most location was to include the prefix.)