Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Discussion about Mercury Car restoration projects. This is not an all out engine section. Discuss whatever is of concern to your MEL car restoration project.
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mercs4fun
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury brake and fule lines

Post by mercs4fun » Tue 22. Apr 2014, 01:06

Time for the brake lines. I found one supplier in the US that could make all the brake lines for me, but since he like a lot of US sellers refused to ship overseas I just ordered brake and fuel lines by the foot and made them myself. The long ones are kind of hard to make, and especially the fuel line wasn't easy at all without the correct bending tools. But I managed to do it and it looks pretty good to me, and that's what counts.
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As you can see in some of the pictures above I have also installed the shocks. I bought a set of Monroe gas charged chocks for the car, but out of the box they were black, and that is boring, so I decided to give them a nicer blue metallic paint. Probably not so correct, but what don't we do for the look?
04april12.jpg
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by mercs4fun » Tue 22. Apr 2014, 01:18

In an earlier post I told that I needed an overhaul kit for my power brake booster. I thought that it would be easy, but not so. Both Lincoln Old part store and Mark II enterprises refused to sell this kit to me and told me to send in my old booster so they could rebuild it for me. That is not really an option when you live in Norway as shipping is expensive and also the taxes makes this very expensive. So then I had to put that to rest for a while and try to figure out what to do. Luckily I was sitting searching eBay for brake booster overhaul kit one morning, and there I found a kit for a Cadillac, and it turned out to be the same. It was kind of expensive, but that made me think that there might be other cars that used the same Bendix brake booster, so I started to search for a rebuild kit for that instead of something for a specific car. So instead of paying hundreds of $$$ to someone I ended up with a NOS brake booster and master cylinder seal kit for $40 that had all the parts I needed. :D
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UNfortunately I forgot to take picutres of the rebuild process of the booster, but it is a pretty straight forward job. Nothing really hard to do or interesting going on inside these.
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by mercs4fun » Tue 22. Apr 2014, 01:29

DISASTER

I had nothing but problems with the NOS cam shaft I bought on eBay. First the seller refused to ship to Norway, so a friend offered me to help and gave me an address to a friend of him I could ship to and this person there would. Well, guess what, this person did not ship it, I was waiting for weeks, but nothing happened. Finally I got a helping hand from someone living not too far from the person I shipped it to and he drove there and picked it up and shipped it to me. After some time he got it back in the mail as USPS made a mistake and shipped it back to him instead of me. He went back to the postal office and resent it and this time it made it to Norway, but unfortunately in two pieces :evil: The seller did not wrap it in bubble plastic like I asked him to do so it did not get much protection from the tube it was shipped in. I guess this camshaft never was meant to go in my engine after all. So sad, and a lot of wasted time and money. Now I am waiting for a new one from Falcon Global. Hopefully it will arrive in one piece.
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by Theo » Tue 22. Apr 2014, 04:29

What a desaster. So unreal!!!
Best regards
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by mercs4fun » Thu 24. Apr 2014, 14:47

While I am waiting for my new camshaft to arrive from the US I decided to get the underside of the body painted. The original plan was to take the body to the sand blaster guy and let him make it clean and nice, but since my budget is limited and I've got some unfortunate extra expenses I decided to clean it myself with whatever hand tools I have. But first of all I needed to clean of all the remains of the undercoating with white spirit. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it is what they say. Too bad that someone turned out to be me. Oh well, about 1.5 gallon of white spirit and 100 yards of paper towels later it was as clean as it gets. In this picture I have just started and got the upper front area cleaned.
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3 days later it looked like this. All surface rust is gone and also the welding seams has been grind down.
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Then I brushed on a rust protective layer of epoxy that seals the metal to make sure there will never again be rust in these areas.
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The rust protective epoxy had to cure over night and then I could spray the epoxy primer before I applied the body seam sealer.
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by Shelby#18 » Thu 24. Apr 2014, 21:21

Gry, do you ever rest??? The progress is just amazing. So sorry to see the post about the camshaft. Sent you a pm.

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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by mercs4fun » Thu 24. Apr 2014, 23:05

Rick, Yes I do rest now and then, but lately I have been working late nights so I can get the body back on the frame to free up one space in my garage. Regarding PM, for some reason when I try to log on to read or send PM I am told that I am not authorized to use Personal messages. It is probably one of Theo's security settings to avoid spam? If email is an option mine is gry att stordahl.com
Theo, if you read this I would appreciate it if you could adjust those settings so PM is available to me as well.
Thanks.
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by mercs4fun » Fri 25. Apr 2014, 05:55

PM fixed, message read, thank you Rick and Theo.

I Just painted the underside of the body. Luckily I have several liters with old fashion acrylic paint from back when it was super quality, cheap and easy to find. By mixing some leftover colors from previous restorations I managed to make a color pretty close to what originally had been used under this car. I call the color chocolate milk brown :) Some people seems to think that one specific color is correct for the underside of these old cars, but that is not so since they used whatever leftover paint that was available and mixed it together to use on the car where color wasn't important. At least that's what I've been told from someone that worked at Ford back then. I've seen grey, light blue, green , pink, brown and yellow under the body up until 1964. When I restore the car I always try to paint the underside in the same color as it came from factory.
04april25_1.jpg
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by mercs4fun » Thu 1. May 2014, 15:08

I have been pretty eager for a while to find the color to use for the Mercury and paint an area so I can see how it will look.
As a result I decided to do the firewall ready for paint. I did pretty much the same here as under the car, removed all old paint and surface rust and then epoxy primer, but then also sprayed a few layers of surfacer to remove scratches and imperfections.
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With the firewall ready for paint I had to go to the paint shop to try to find the color I wanted. I had decided to go for a color similar to the 60 Cadillac violet named Heather as mentioned in an earlier post, but found that no one this side of the pond had the mixing formula for that color, so I decided to leave that idea and look for something similar. After hours looking through color chips I was down to only two candidates, one a little more lilac than the cadillac color and one that was a little more into the mauve color, but that still had some lilac in it. I decided to go for the last one. The color is a BMW coclor named Samoa blue.
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So here is the color. It is pretty close to what I expected, but I might add a little violet pearl to make it really sparkle in the sun. Time will show.
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Re: Building a 1960 Mercury Park Lane convertible

Post by mercs4fun » Sat 3. May 2014, 12:21

Got another down trip today as I placed the body back on the frame and took the car out in daylight to check the color on the firewall. As you can see there is not much violet in this color, so that means I have to lift the body again and repaint with a different color.
paint4.jpg
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