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1950 MERCURY 4-DOOR
"The Swiss '50"
Mild Custom - Project in Progress
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This red car doesn’t exist. Yet. The photo at right is a digitally
altered photo showing what this Mercury is supposed to look
like when it’s finished. Named after the famous cheese, you can see in the photos below that even by Rust Belt standards, this car was in pretty rough shape. By California standards, well, as they say in Hollywood: if you’re going to dream, dream big.
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BEFORE:
Dreaming Big
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Actually, this car has a lot going for it. All the expensive and irreplaceable little pieces have been removed and stashed. Except for one rear fender and the front splash pan, all the panels are in pretty good shape. Even though some panels are rusted through, there’s enough left to determine what the patch panel should look like.
The owner of this car is on a non-show-car budget and just wants a cool cruiser. Rosie’s is up to the challenge.
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AUTOMOTIVE ARCHAEOLOGY
Sometimes You Wonder...
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The front of this rear fender has been ‘repaired’ before by someone who liked to embed wads of wire mesh in his plastic filler and then put lots of screws through the panel to make sure everything stayed in place. It didn’t, obviously, and I had to cut nine rusted screws out of this tiny area.
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TWO LAYERS OF SWISS
Only Solidified Rubber Held in This Window
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The whole rear window opening was a lesson in negative space. It just wasn’t there. The outer layer (the roof panel) was completely eaten away by rust, and the inner layer (the support bracket between the roof and headliner) wasn’t much better. A donor car isn’t in the budget, so a new window lip will have to be fabricated.
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IT'S ALL IN THE DETAILS
Filling Molding Holes the Right Way
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There were about 150 molding holes on this car, I think. Or maybe it just seemed that way. Most of them had been stuffed with - you guessed it - plastic filler by the last tech. I cleaned out all the holes, welded them, and am grinding them flat.
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FABRICATING PATCH PANELS
Thank Goodness Cars Come with Two Sides
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Here’s the left rear fender extracted from the car after the rusted screw/mesh/bondo incident. The other side was intact, so I made a paper template off the right side, flipped it over, and roughed out a patch panel for the left fender.
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REAR WINDOW REPAIR
All I Want for Christmas...
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...Is a shrinker-stretcher. Until then, we’ll do whatever it takes to keep the project moving along.
Check back soon to see how this Merc is progressing.
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