I've been thinking about making a tube grille for our 1964 Mercury convertible for a while. The original grille is a stamped aluminium affair with vertical bars. The design is fussy, and the blacked out areas really needed repainting. I don't have a good before pic, but this one shows the grille reasonably well. A complicating factor is the quad headlights. I designed the grille to use the existing headlight surrounds. This means that the new bars follow the same V profile as the original, both vertically and horizontally. The first step was removing the headlights and original grille. A workshop manual was handy as there are quite a few bolts involved. I had to paint the area behind the headlights satin black as it was previously body coloured. I got rid of the dead moths later! Each dual headlight assemble is a large pot-metal casting that bolts through the radiator support in 4 places. The tube grille assembly between the headlights would need to be attached to this casting.
After checking out some tubing sizes and looks I settled on a 7-bar design using 5/8" (16mm) stainless steel tubing. I made some plywood mounting brackets to test out the look. When correctly assembled the headlight bezels cover the ends of the tubing. After sourcing some tubing and cutting to the correct lengths (the usual measure twice, cut once routine) I made a template (with the small holes) then used this to create a couple of mounting plates from some stainless steel sheet. The larger holes were drilled with a unibit. Most of the holes where then cut off with a Bosch shear to leave this shape. The small cutouts were a bit help in locating and aligning the tubing.
For these short pieces I also used the plywood brackets for alignment when welding. The tubes were MIG welded to the mounts. I didn't have an SS wire handy so just used the normal steel MIG setup - hopefully this won't bite me in the ass later. Due to the stepping spacing of the headlights (that matches the overall V at the front of this Mercury) the mounts are not at 90 degrees to the tubing.
I didn't really want to drill the headlight mount casting, but didn't see a good option. So I made these large mounting plates which bolt to the casting in four places. Trial assembly. Both between-headlight assemblies with the mounting brackets and plates painted black. Looking OK!
Now for the main part of the grille. I had a friend (Hi Shane) cut the main bars and tig weld them together at the correct angle. I hand filed the welds then finished the joins with various grades of emery tape and a quick session with a buffer. Partially assembled here with some of the plywood mounts to see if it was all going to work. I started the assembly with the shortest (middle) bar and some more mounting brackets Adding bars. The shaped brackets made it really easy to assemble straight. It would have been a real pain to get in alignment any other way.
Once fully assembled I blocked the bars up in the grille opening and made some body mounts to span between the existing radiator support structure (or hood latch in this case) and the triangular brackets. This worked well, and made it easy to assemble the grille first. Remember to check at each stage that the grille can be removed from the car without too much dismantling, and that all the mounting bolts can be reached with a socket or spanner. Cutting out some more stainless for the body mounts. This shear made life easy! Once all together I painted all the bracketry (and welds on the backside of the tubes) with a spray bomb. Overspray on the tubing was removed with thinners before it dried. The finished product. I am really pleased how this turned out. It cleans up the front of the car no end. Since this pic we've been on a long drive to the Whangamata Beach Hop. No problems with the grille except a fair few bugs stuck on it! Cruising at the Beach Hop!
I was against this change untill I saw it done. Very cool, nice job bro. skeptic turned fan!! ~sololobo~
Looks great..don't know what the stainless cost you, but glory grilles wanted $ 600 for a chrome tube for my t bird.. im sure you beat that..
I too thought, don't mess with the original,..but, i was wrong. Looks very nice, and you did a nice write up too.
Great writeup and quite an improvement with that grill. The extra effort to put the bars between the headlights really makes it a classy installation along with matching the V's of the original grill both vertically an horizontally, nice work all around.
Nice description and pics, I'd love to have this for my 64 Park Lane convertible. Posted from the TJJ App for iPhone & iPad
Awesome job, but I have to admit it's a toss up for me. I imagine if I owned the car for any length of time I'd probably be used to it and ready for a change, too, but that stock grille is a great design IMO. Still can't deny your piece is impressive in itself.
I had my doubts how it would look when I saw the first couple of pictures, but it really did turn out great. Cleaned up the front a lot and doesn't look out of place at all. Good job. Don
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