1950 Mercury Custom Coupe

1950 Mercury Custom Coupe, click picture to enlarge.

There is now well over 60 different cars on this blog and I am adding more cars almost every day so spend some time looking through the whole thing. Use the older posts and newer posts links to scroll through all of them. then tell the other old car buffs that you know about this old car blog and let them enjoy some time here too. That's what this is all about anyway, enjoying these old cars and riding down memory lane for a while to relax and enjoy ourselves without spending a pile of money to do it. Come back often to see what's new.

When it comes to talking about customized cars there is just no telling what you might find unless you know the particular car you are talking about. I will give you some information about a standard 1950 Mercury in just a moment but first let me tell you about a "custom" Ford that me and a friend built up in the early 1950's. Before I tell you about the car I need to tell you how we came about building this car. Back then it was fairly common for young people to get just anything that they could rake and scrape up enough money to buy. Then when they, or we as the case might be, would look around in the junk yards and other places and find parts and pieces that we could make fit and build up a car as near like we wanted as we could with what we had. Now with that in mind here is the car that we built up. We started with a 1932 Ford Murray coupe, the one with the little side window in the rear quarter panel that was much like the 1956 Ford Thunderbird side port. Then we put a 1936 mercury V-8 engine in it and a 1948 Mercury Holley carbureter, a 1937 Lincoln Zephyr transmission and a 1928 Model A rear end spider gear assembly. Yep, we got all of that to fit together and it run pretty good. In fact, that 1932 Ford Murray coupe would not run over 78 miles per hour on flat ground but it would get that 78 quicker than that a cat could scat!! We drove that car to West Palm Beach where the police had just started using the new Harley Davidson motorcycles for patrol duty. We knew many of the police patrolmen and would challenge them to drag race against that Ford and it would beat those Harleys every time. Now a little bit about the 1950 Mercury.


I had to do a little bit of extra research to find this information because most of the 1950 Mercury info is about modified cars and not the standard stock Mercury. The stock engine was a 255.4 cid flathead V8 that developed 110 horsepower at 3600 rpm. The horsepower to weight ratio was 33 pounds per horsepower and 26.2 horsepower per liter of engine size and a compression ratio of 6.8:1. The engine had 3 main bearings and a Holley 2 barrel carbureter. The 1950 Mercury had a standard 3 speed column mount gearshift and an optional Touch-a-matic automatic transmission. The car weighed 3630 pounds and cost $2,140 new. The 1950 Mercury was the best selling model made up until that time selling 233,000 cars 1n 1950 and also selling the one millionth Mercury that year. Henry Ford came up with the vision of making a car to bridge the price gap batween the low priced Fords and the high end Lincolns and The Mercury was born to do just that and it did it in an amazingly successful fashion.