Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

[mercs4fun]

The top frame restoration turned out to become a serious challenge, as I had to fight both serious rust, broken screws and seized pins in the joints. Also the holes in the sink frame parts were just too big as the holes were worn and made larger because of the very rusty pins. After some thinking I found the solution, and that was to have a machine shop to turn both new oversize pins and nylon bushings. Then I adjusted the size on the holes to fit these.

Some parts needed some creative fixes.

After test fitting everything the parts were prepared for new paint.

And painted.

Chrome parts were polished.

And assembly could start.

Looking good, moves freely and tight.

And it's back on the car.

[mercs4fun]

I spent a few really late evenings working on the interior door panels. They took a lot more time than I expected SMS Auto Fabrics https://www.smsautofabrics.com, who made the vinyl covers for me did a mistake and forgot to make the front top part black, so I had to dye that to get it just the way I wanted, but they look really nice now.

[mercs4fun]

I had more rainy days and late evenings working on my car lately. One of the things left to do before I start to reassemble the car is to restore the vent windows and get the side glass in the frames. Through the years I have collected 4 pairs of vent windows, all with different flaws and problems. One set had nice chrome but rotted out seals, one set had nice seals, one set had nice screws and brackets. So I started with taking them all apart, drilled out the rivets that is holding the seals and picking the parts I wanted to reuse. You can actually buy a reproduction vent window seal for these, but I prefer to use the old originals when possible before some not so good expensive reproductions. Also some seals for the 59/60 Mercury will fit from the Ford catalog. The vent window seal is actually a 2pc seal, one front and one rear, and the rear is the same is 60/61 Ford 2 d ht. if I remember right. Anyway, most of the job was pretty much straight forward, but it is a lot of work. Take everything apart, polish stainless, polish chrome, clean rubber, install good and new rubber seals with rivets, clean and install other parts and glass in the frames.
The only major problem I ran into was the new glass run division bars that I bought from Dennis carpenter. They are junk and I decided to reuse the old ones and glue in new glass run liner. I bought the reproductions a few years ago, so maybe they have come up with better parts now, but if not stay away from these. For a number of reasons they are ill fitting poor quality pieces and will not stay in place as they lack the grove in the side to hold them in place in the vent window frame. They are also made out of thin weak metal that does not support the wide glass as they should, which may cause the glass to crack.

Old vent windows spread over the floor.

Disassembling them here

Door glass frames polished, glass in place,

And putting back together with good parts.

New glass ready to go in with glass setting tape.

Just showing the rivets and the ford rear vent window seal that fits like a glove

Here are the door glass and frames reassembled and the new liner is glues in both the front and rear glass runs. It is pretty good looking now and the only thing I dislike is that I decided to buy glass with no factory marks in them as I was going to etch these in myself. Now the company that I was supposed to buy the glass etching kit from does not respond to emails and I have been unable to order them. Oh well, I can live with that, maybe I can get that fixed later.

Here are the original division bar run and you can see the groove that is missing on the reproductions making those unable to use and fit right. But honestly, that's not the only problem, as the over all quality is really bad as well.

[mercs4fun]

This forum is probably the loneliest place on Internet.....

[Shelby#18]

Your build is still going nicely. Sorry I haven't been on in a while. I'm currently building a factory in Nevada, and still running down to L.A. to manage the other.

[Theo]

Very nice.

[mercs4fun]

I guess its time for an annual update. Not much going on here. I really hoped to have this car finished by now, but that is not how it turned out. My new band and other cars I am also restoring took most of my time this year. Among them my 68 Park Lane.

Anyway, I have done a few things. First of all I decided to get the trim installed on the rear and quarters of the car. I had pretty much everything NOS for the car so it should be easy... Well, not so. Some of the NOS trim were actually in worse condition that my old trim, so in the end I decided to restore most of my old trim and reuse them.

[mercs4fun]

The next step was to hang on the doors and trunk lid and to install all NOS lock mechanism.

Installing the dash board turned out to be a real challenge. It is heavy and it just would not fit until I found out that I have placed the fuses for the power windows 90 degrees wrong which made it impossible to get the dash where it was supposed to be. It took a few attempts to get it there before I found out.
As you can see in the last picture I have also started installing the side windows.

[mercs4fun]

Here is another thing I've been struggling with. I wanted a set of original dual rear antennas for my car and have been looking for a set for years, but had not luck. Then, with just a few days between, two different sellers on ebay listed what they called front antennas for 57 Mercurys on ebay, but I noticed they both were NOS rear antennas. So I ended up buying them and was extremely happy until I "treid" them on my car and they just did not look right. Later I told a friend of mine about my this, and he showed me his set of NOS Edsel antennas which have a far heavier design of the base. There and then I knew they had to go on my car, and since my friend have a 57 Mercury Pace car and no Edsel, we made a deal and he got the NOS 57-59 antennas and I now have the Edsel antennas for my 60. I couldn't be happier.

[mercs4fun]

Then there is this contintal kit project I started many years ago. When I came to the chrome show they told me the design were no good and that it would be really hard to do the bumper part with a good result as it was. So they asked me to make to 2 piece design that could be bolted together instead of the one piece welded together as it was. That turned out to be a lot of work, and at the same time I also redesigned the bumper a but and also added brackets to install the fake 60 Ford exhaust tips that I have found.

With the new design worked out the guys at the chrome shop was happy and did an excellent job.