Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

[mercs4fun]

The convertible top bows turned out to be in much worse condition than I remembered from when I disassembled the car. Just to take everything apart was a battle, and unfortunately I found that I have some serious problems here, but hopefully they can be solved.

The front bow turned out to be in a miserable condition with lots of pin holes and rust .

[mercs4fun]

I've been playing with the interior door/side panels for the last couple of days. The old door panel fiber boards were not in the best shape, and the metal parts were rather rusty and ugly as well. So the metal was removed from the old door panels and sand blasted before they got new black paint. Then I cut out new panels from the best quality fiber board I could find. There is a lot of work involved in this because of all the holes that has to be made for the trim and fasteners. Then I put the metal pieces back on the fiber boards with a glue and pop rivets. Now the only thing left to do is to put on the new vinyl, polish all the trim and then some.....

[jetseeker]

Ary update on this project?

[mercs4fun]

It is amazing how fast time flies. It is nearly 2 years since my last update on the 60 Mercury, and to be honest I really thought the car would have been done by now 2 years ago. Unfortunately there has been some major bumps in the road, and I've also been busy working on other cars a lot of the time. Anyway, I have made some progress, and I will try to catch up on these now.

After the car was painted the first thing I wanted to install was the wiper system, wiring systems for power windows and seat, and then of course the heater and AC. Unfortunately one of my hard drives quit working at that time, so I don't have much pictures to show from that, but I was lucky to find a couple.

[mercs4fun]

Next up was to install the new windshield. That's when the big problems started. When we installed the windshield it just cracked for what we believed to be no reason what so ever. As most people can imagine these windshields are not cheap, so it was a bad situation for me. And then all went from bad to worse when I removed the cracked windshield and the gasket tore apart. For me that was just too much, and I decided to put the project on hold until I had the money to buy a new windshield and gasket.

[mercs4fun]

While the car itself has been sitting quietly in the garage, I have restored some parts that did not take much money to do so they would be ready to install in the future. First out was the power seat mechanism that I took totally apart, cleaned everything, then re plated the parts that was supposed to be so and painted other parts before I put everything back together. I also made sure all the electrical components were in good working order.

The steering column and and steering wheel needed a lot of work. Especially the cracked steering wheel took a lot of patience to restore. Luckily I found a NOS horn ring and steering wheel center just in time to put it on for the picture showing the assembled parts. Unfortunately most of the restoration pictures of both the seat mechanism and steering wheel/column is lost as well.

[mercs4fun]

I also decided to replace all the side glass with new green tinted glass and had them custom made using the old side glass as templates. The quarter window frames has been at what I consider to be the best chrome shop in Norway, and the result is absolutely perfect. The stainless parts have been restored by me. One part that took me a lot of effort to make it work as it was supposed to was the hinge in the lower front of the quarter window. These have a tendency to get stuck, with the result that the window doesn't move the way it is supposed to when it is lowered, and after a while stress on the frame will make it crack. I have found that it is very important that these moves freely.

[mercs4fun]

A nicely restored instrument panel is crucial for any car. I had a new dash pad made by Just Dashes. Luckily I also had a few important NOS parts, like the speedometer lens and some chrome parts to use. When I took these pictures the dash was not 100% finished. The sharp eyed person will notice one extremely unusual option, and that is the controller for the cruise control unit. This option was not available before 1961, but since I had a set up laying around I decided to use it for this car.

[mercs4fun]

The seats needed a lot of attention as one of the previous owners must have been a pretty heavy person, and especially the drivers side of the front seat frame were in terrible condition with lots of springs either broken or stretched. Also the seat back were totally bent out of shape so it had to be replaced. Fortunately I had a front seat from another car that I could use for parts, so what I did was to take all the best springs from both seats and make one good seat frame out of the two. The seat cushion is molded, and I took a good molded foam piece from a 63 Mercury seat. The seat covers was made by an upholstery shop many years ago, and have just been stored for years waiting for the seats to be done. It was kind of amazing to see how well they fit the seats and the quality of the work they did for me. It is not always like that. OK, i'll post some pictures and you can see for yourself what has been done.

The first image shows some of the broken springs in the front seat.

Seat frames on my living room floor.

two tired seat frames has become one good and has been painted.

Building up the seat exactly the same way as the factory did is time consuming, but interesting.

The molded cushion for the front seat came out of a 1963 Mercury Monterey that a friend parted out many years ago.

The seat back is painted and going back together exactly the way as the factory did it with original type materials. No modern stuff in here.

Front seat is (almost) done.

So is the back seat as well.

[Theo]

Amazing. Thanks for sharing the process.