Started the big strip down , i thought the best place was to start at the front and work back with the idea of having a bare chassis by the end of the Christmas holidays, although seriously rusted the front panel and bumper will be repaired and re used, the front panel still has in place the rare round Bedford badge

With the front panel removed the soldered joints holding the radiator to its frame had long since failed and after cutting through what was left of the radiator hoses it was simply lifted out of the frame leaving the support brackets and fan shroud behind to be unbolted

With the radiator mountings etc. removed i could now access the engine with the fan ,water pump and dynamo  removed work started to remove the cylinder head

Surprisingly all the cylinder head bolts came out without too much of a struggle with the worst corroshion on the heads of the bolts , removing the cylinder head revealed the corroded mess you see bellow which on first inspection is not that bad but !

When i started digging in the rust in cylinder number six my screw driver went straight through what was left of the piston

How long has this truck been laid up, it must take a very long numbers of years for a piston to dissolve hopefully if there is no more damage to the engine block it can be salvaged by fitting cylinder liners .

I mentioned in my first post that the engine number MW 30134 matched the stamping on the bulkhead data plate , closer inspection shows that this number is over stamped on top of the original engine number which hopefully i can read on the reverse of the plate when it is removed ,the replacement engine is a wartime factory rebuilt unit dated October 1943

Could i ask if there are any more examples of replacement engine numbers being overstamped in this way ?