Truck Date vs Engine Date

[DDBCK]

I guess I am a little confused. My truck is a 2007 according to the VIN & door sticker, but when looking at the engine this morning there is a manufactures sticker on the top passenger side of the engine with a 2006 date. What gives?

[fordfan30]

I work at Louisville Assembly Plant and we built the Explorer, Sport Trac, and Mountaineer. One of the many jobs I do is engine pick. Simply picking them out of the racks they are shipped in and putting them on the line. We would receive engines by the boatload literally. The area where we would pick engines is quite a bit larger than most other work area due to the size of the engines. As long as the fork lift operator would keep me stocked up I would work nearest my other stock for that job to eliminate excessive walking and dragging of engines. Personally I hated walking to the far end of the work zone to get an engine because it takes time and its easy to get behind and you have to rush to get caught up. Rushing with even just a 4.0 v6 can be dangerous because they are heavy. Our 4.6 v8 was noticabely heavier. I wouldnt want to pick diesel engines. I know a guy who now works at my plant but worked at Kentucky Truck and he said their pick set up is similar. So you could have an engine that was just in the far end of the work zone and sat there for a couple months. Another possibility is one of the engines in the rack was damaged during shipping somehow. That rack could have been sent to incoming quality supervisor or sent back to international. Now saying that I will say I have seen engines with old build dates and new build date stickers over top of them. Don't know who did it but I guess the engine manufacturer. Also they could have had leftover stock lets say where they build the E series and shipped those to KTP to be used. I have seen this before also.