Re: New Member: My '39 120 has strange engine number. Help??

Posted by Dennis Taylor On 2010/10/14 2:52:37

There is no sign that the pan has been modified. The reason for replacing it is that it got water in it back when the car was in the salvage yard, and rusted the bottom inside pretty severly, with lots of thinspots. Some pinholes had formed, and when uncle John (now deceased) did the "cosmetic" restoration, he sanded down the outside surface and painted it with epoxy. That held up for about 25 yrs and kept the oil in, but began to separate and started leaking progressively worse over the last several years. Finally, last month it got really ugly, so I pulled it off and sandblasted it, exposing the thin spots and many small holes. I tried brazing them up, but the floor of the pan is so thin and impregnated with oil, that the torch heat just cracks the metal and creates more holes. I probably also had the torch too hot, too much O2, so the metal buckled up and it is a total mess! Well, that's the story, probably more than you wanted to know!
I'm going out to try again to get a picture of that engine number and post it in the morning.