Removing VIN numbers

[RichSchmidt]

I figured that title might get some atention.Here is my situation.I hear a lot about cars with restamped engines.I hear of these cars being decked and having new codes stamped.I recently stumbled across a list of bigblock chevy engine codes and decided to go and see if I could find what the 454 block in my race car actually came out of{it is a late 1973#289 block}.Now to put this into perspective,this block is so decked that the pistons stick .020" out of the hole,yet there is still about 80% of the VIN number still on the block.The letter codes for the application are gone,but the VIN is still there.So my question is how much do these guys deck these engines to get the numbers off,and do they usually have other problems.I have no interest in doing this,but it just struck me as odd that my engine was decked over .040" and still had deep numbers on it.I find it hard to believe those numbers could ever be taken off and the block still be useable.So what is the real story with these restamps?