Quote:
Originally Posted by meanlean
My friend is building a hotrod with an industrial Flathead in his car, now he need to go to inspection and he need building year and horspower for his title. I Googled a lot but could not find anything, I hope you guys could help. the enginenumber is *S54I* stamped between intake and cylinderhead on the drivers side.
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Welcome to The FordBarn! There is no way to tell for sure what year that engine was manufactured. It has what are commonly referred-to as 24-stud heads, but this engine has head BOLTS rather than STUDS with nuts, possibly an "INDUSTRIAL" feature at the time. The 24-stud arrangement first came-about in mid-1938, and was rated at 85 Horsepower in Ford vehicles. The fan arrangement of being bolted onto the generator like that was LAST used on 1939 Standard Ford engines in automobiles. The distributor design was used only 1937 through 1941. All known Ford serial numbers of the time were precluded by, and finished with a star like your pictures show, but that numbering sequence looks nothing like any Ford vehicles that most of us are familiar with. The "S"
COULD possibly stand for something like "SPECIAL", and the ending "I" is actually the font that Ford used to represent the number "1" since about the 1931 timeframe to help preclude fraudulent serial number markings. It should be noted that Ford NORMALLY did NOT mark serial numbers on production AUTOMOTIVE engines of that era. My guess is that it is, like you indicated, a special Ford-supplied industrial-type powerplant. Going by the coupling methods I am familiar with for connecting engines with large generators during my working career, that contraption bolted to the rear of the crankshaft appears to be some sort of "break-away" connector fixture allowing minimum damage to the powerplant if a generator breaker closes to a buss when not properly phased with another un-like power source. So, my GUESS would be somewhere around the 1939 timeline, 85 horsepower, although using existing Ford parts, it's possible that it could have been procured from Ford as late as 1941 or so. Anything else is likely going to prove to be impossible to document from existing records. DD