Customs what happened to this mercury custom..

Wasn't that the fate of the Chevy in the picture? I seem to recall a later picture of it with a Carson style top.

 

Correct...
The car now has a rather ugly removable top and "regular' doors.
Conrad also owns the former "Tower of Power" chevy.



The photo was taken by Howard Gribble and that is Conrad standing next to the car.

 

Wow Rik thanks for posting this pic of lopeze's merc. Your pic just sent me back to the mid 70 when i was still in high school. Growing up building cars with my father we mostly built chopped 33/34 or 39/40 Ford hot rods and thought they where the shit but lopeze' merc and the Miss San Pedro merc made me look at custom merc's in a total new light. Thanks again Rik, Erickson / Extreme Kustoms

 

Hey,

Does anyone know if Charlie Lopez also built the " Tower of Power"?

Gettin' in and out of those 24'' doors on the last addition of that build sure must be fun

 

These cars are bad ass!! As a kid never looked at old playboys much I was checking these cars out in the lowrider magazines!! Great memories!!!

 

I, like Rik, pretty much wore out my issues of Street Rodder and Classic and Custom with this car in it....you built a waaaaay better model than I did, though, Rik. I never cease to be amazed and impressed by the level of your talents!

I just have to sit back and chuckle when I see cars like this slammed with an obvious ignorance of the time and place it came from. Just like I posted on another thread, history and context of the time is critical to understanding and appreciating "tradition."

 

The car is very typical of the competitive show cars of the late 60's and though the 70's. They got big changes every other year and many got new paint jobs every year to be fresh for the next show season. If your competitors made new modifications you had to make more dramatic modifications to top them. By our standards today they weren't always for the best but that car is an Icon of the time period and the quest for the show points.

And a reminder that in the 70's we did a lot of things to our rods and customs that would be considered quite horrendous by today's standards but were the hot lick then.

Just show up at a rod trot now with a full fendered Model A coupe with a stock width Olds rear end with 15x10 rims and N50 tires that are only half covered by the fenders and see what the comments are today.

 

Ugh!

 

If the doors were less bulky looking it would work better

 

I love it. If they were all chopped the same way, lowered the same way, with the same bumpers/grilles/trim, with the same wheels/tires/hubcaps, then the custom Merc scene would be pretty damned boring.





Oh wait...

 

Since I find my custom roots really started with low riders and low rider bikes, I have to say I love it all!! A real sense of creativity goes into all these cars, and I can appreciate the different phases these pictures show us!

 

Same story for me Rik.
It might be hard to imagion for US car fellows but before 1990 the carscene in the Netherlands was almost none hotrods and none kustoms
and even US car magazines were hard to find.
The customized carscene at that moment were mostly Camaro's, Mustangs, Beetles and ugly Vans.
The Charlie Lopez Merc might be considered ugly now (also be me) but back then it was 'the' thing for me as a teener.

Hennie

 

Hey Hennie,

Picture a time in America when Camaros, Mustangs VWs & Vans & Hot Rods were king, and you pretty much have the 60s-70s! By 1966-68, Kustoms were dead, and no one into cars was building them. This really didn't change until 1981-83. 'bout 1973 Charlie Lopez built his Merc, and many alive had never seen a kustom Merc in anything other than an old magazine! I still remember seeing it at the Los Angeles show in 1979!! WOW, you had to look, kinda like a spaceship! This was the second version of his build, the red one, but it would be another five years before Kustoms would make a slow come back, that's how far head Charlie's merc was.

 

I am here to try to help a friend. He is trying to identify what magazine this article was published in. We suspect it is in the UK and the issue might be May 1979. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Tom Ballenger

 

After looking closely at the photo, I saw May 1979 in the bottom left corner of the page.


Sent from my iPhone using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

Looking back though the thread and through Riks coverage and photos on his site I remember when that Nov 1974, Street Rodder came out. I was living in Texas and my Merc was behind my grandparents barn here on the farm where I live now. Even though I wasn't a fan of some of the mods I studied that article until I wore the magazine and it no doubt had a bit of influence on my getting my Merc back on the road a year or so after I moved back up here from Texas.