[rotorwrench]

Ford Motor Company stopped stamping numbers on the engines after the end of the 200 CID 4-cylinder Model A & B engines. After that is was first stamped into the engine assembly which included the transmission and wouldn't you know the transmission is where they stamped them. When the engine assembly was dropped into the frame, the numbers were copied to it with stamps. Ford only put a date code on engines and not all of them either. Henry Ford passed the torch on to Henry II not long before his death. Things started to change after 1947 but it was up through around 1952 when they really fully implemented the later Ford numbering system. By 1954, stuff was numbered by P/N pretty well. Date codes vary depending on the part.

1960 was kind of a bad year for FoMoCo. They had to stop production on the Edsel early in that production year. This caused a lot of stuff to get moved around and re-purposed. The USA Meteor (Correction "Comet" it's an interstellar thing) production went from being part of the Edsel line up to being a car sold by Mercury dealers but it had no Mercury name on it yet. The Ford line up was trying to get more variation in it to help with slumping sales but they did OK. This had to have made for a lot of mixing and matching of parts. Most of the MEL engine line was dropped in favor of the FE with the Lincoln/Thunderbird 430 being the last of its type. The FE was only a few years into its run but eventually took over as the big engine for the Ford and Mercury lines. The Y blocks were kept for a long time until the 221/260/289 started catching up for the small block production. 1960 was the first year for the Falcon line so they were concentrating a lot of changes for that too. A lot of those early 60s Fords ended up in the salvage yards with the exceptions to the collectable models. You don't see too many of those big Fairlanes and early Galaxie cars on the streets any more.