[rotorwrench]

I haven't worked on any 41/42 Merc/truck blocks or wartime ones either but the 99 block that I have seen (1939) does have thicker walls. Maby not a lot thicker but noticably thicker through the water jacket ports than a 59 series. FoMoCo was changing the castings in the 41/42 time frame plus the wartime stuff may have been affected by shortages of materials. The most common wartime vehicles I've seen that had US built V8 engines were big COE transport trucks. I don't know how many were made for the war effort but I've seen pictures of them in Red Ball Express photos and others. These trucks were easy to maintain and the engines could be changed quickly if the maintenance facility had the cradle tools. Ford made a lot of G8T trucks but they were all 6-cylinder. Ford made other conventional cab big trucks for fire engines and they made the bomb loaders but I don't know if they had V8 engines or not. The bomb loaders resemble the CMP trucks made in Canada. My Pops outfit in Foggia, Italy had both the fire trucks and the bomb loaders. I just wish he were still around to answer questions about them. I'm sure all that stuff stayed in Europe & North Africa after the war.