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.
![Traurig :(](./images/smilies/icon_e_sad.gif)
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.