Bet y'all thought you were rid of me, huh!? I have a question that hopefully somebody can help point me in the right direction.

Had a long talk with bro-in-law last weekend while fidhin', got a half-hearted offer to buy back the car but he looked so pitiful I haven't taken him up on it yet. I had presented all of my evidence of the car's advanced age and he said the seller (his neighbor) swears on his mother's grave, a 6 foot stack of bibles, etc., that the car only had 30k miles on it before the court had it impounded while an apparently sticky estate was probated and resolved. He contends that somebody must have "switched" engines with this one while it was in impound.

I told bro-in-law that I suppose it was remotely possible for this to happen but looking at other signs (grease caked rear-end, butchered wiring, totally shot interior, wear on the front carpets, etc.) tells me that the car has well over 30k on it. If I can authoritatively say, "This engine has not been changed, because...", I can at least go down and watch him probably give the ol boy a good ass whuppin'. Might not be $1500 worth of entertainment but it'd be better than nothing!

Now that my boring story is finished, my gestion is (to those of you I haven't ran off yet) is there some way to verify if a Merc has it's original engine or not? With the l/h head off I was finally able to find the engine serial number (which isn't even close to the VIN) but I'm not sure what to do with it! ;-)

Any help will be appreciated.

Regards,

Justin B.