1950 Mercury custom build

K

K13

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So my truck is nearing completion. I had a friend of mine do a tune up on it so it is running much better but needs to be driven for a while and then some little stuff sorted out but winter hit here at the beginning of November so it is kind of on hold for 5-6 months. With being pretty much stuck at home due to Covid I figured it was time to do some work on my next project.

I bought this 1950 Mercury quite a few years ago. It is a bit of a mess and is going to be a pretty major undertaking. It started out as a four door that someone had previously, very poorly, started attempting to turn into a Carson topped car. I am not a huge fan of Carson topped Merc’s so I left the fiberglass top that the previous owner had with the car and have been collecting parts to turn it into a coupe over the ensuing years. When I bought the car the guy selling it had a basket case 4 door as well so I cut the roof off of that to use.

When I first brought it home I did some quick fitting of the 4 door top to the body just to make it easier to store so this is basically what I brought home.

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The car has a lot of filler on it which will have to be remedied. It is hard to see but the tops of all the doors had been cut off and a sheet of steel welded over the top to make it a roadster with no side glass so I will have to fabricate all of those parts. I do have the door tops from a 4 door that I will use for the upper section. All the other typical Merc issues like rockers exist and will have to be dealt with as well but I figured I should try and give the body some sort of stability before I tackle any of those and decided to press on with the top.

So I bought some quarter windows and proceeded to start working at adding them to the car. I was a little lax at picture taking when I first started but this gives an idea of what was involved on the drives side.

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So before I finish welding the drivers side I wasted to get the passenger side fit up.
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I did as much on the bench as I could so I could access all the sides easier than when it is in the car.
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So I had to make up some filler pieces to go along the top of the window frame as these quarter windows each had a chunk cut out of them when I got them.
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And tacked in place.
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There was a huge gap in the upper inner roof door frame from where I cut out the b pillar from the 4 door top. To fill that I cut a straight section out of the section I removed that would have been over the rear doors and fit it into the gap to fill the void. Needed a bit of a slice and opening up at the back and I am going to have to thin out the part that was still attached to the roof as it flared out as it approached the b pillar so it’s a bit too wide. I cut some out but it needs a bit more. All of this takes forever because the inside of everything is covered in some sort of tar like substance which all has to be cleaned off or it gasses through the welds leaving a mess. It was clearly designed o stay on forever. At this point everything is just tacked in place. Oh and this picture shows you the crappy job the guy did turning this into a roadster.
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At this point I felt I had a problem. Despite thinking I had matched everything up from the drivers side to the passenger side the passenger side looked bigger to me so I started doing some more measurements and it was about 3/8″- 1/2″ larger from about 2″ behind the door to the back of the window and I felt it looked better so thankfully having only tacked the drivers side together I went back and cut out the portion that was not matching, made a template (should have used my brain and done this the first time but kind of glad I didn’t), and I will have to go about remaking pieces and fitting it back together. Very happy I decided not to fully weld this side in before I tackled the passenger side and in the end I think the quarter windows will look better so it ended up being a good mistake.
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And clamped in place.
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This is where I am at currently. The cold weather hit this weekend and my furnace is acting up in the garage so I may have to wait a couple of days for the furnace guy to come out.
 
As Rudyard Kipling said "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" I have done some scary things but nothing like this, but I know that you can do it, so nice to be young and talented, ... rather than old and slow . (y)
 
Thanks K13, this is a great thread. I'm following along as I want to chop my '48 Chev. The process is pretty much the same. I also have a spare roof and door tops as a source for fill in panels etc.
 
Thanks guys.
Right from the get go I have wanted to use a second grill shell opening at the front flipped upside down like the Bettancourt Mercury.
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Well as you may know they are hard to come by, highly sought after and expensive when you find them. I got lucky and found one that was pretty reasonably priced but was not in great shape. The passenger side was in decent shape but the drivers side was a mess. This is what I started with.


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And this was where I ended up after remaking most of this side from scratch.
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The bottom is still a mess but it will be getting cut off anyways so I didn't bother wasting time making it better.
 
Heading in the wrong direction :rolleyes:. I wasn't happy with how the new roof section was going to meet up with the new window section so out it came. Cut the hole a little bigger as well s things will flow better. I also made a curved piece for the rear of the window to give it a better shape.
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Well got the window frame tacked in and spent a few hours wheeling up a filler panel. Getting pretty close with it. I need to trim it closer to the final size, make a few tweaks and it should be close to tack in place again.


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What an insane amount of work!!
Yours and people with talent like yours,, Wow!
Fred
 
I'm wowed with what you've done with that car. It eerily reminds me of a Merc that was just selling when I moved to the Island. Rick (no name) had it & sold it but the one??
 
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JohnnyBgood said:
So do you just wheel the circles or everything but the circle?
Click to expand...
Yes, I wheel inside the circles. Wheeling raises the metal so where there is a low spot you need to wheel more to bring the metal up up to meet the surrounding areas. If I left the area inside the circles and wheeled around them then the low spots would get worse. If the circles were high spots then I would wheel all around them to bring the surrounding metal up to meet them.
 
Ok..so how do you get both sides the same...just by eye or do you have some kind of form. I’m imaging it would not be very easy to make them the same..
 
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