I fell in love with the 1958 Mercury Park Lane the first time I saw a picture of one. So long and sleek, so powerful, and yet so graceful. After I bought an original sales brochure and read the marketing blurb, how could I not want one ! Mercury certainly went to town on the fluffy superlatives. That was probably in about 2006 and so it's taken about 3 years of searching to find my dream car. In that time I have only seen four others for sale in reasonable condition. The first had sold before I found the listing. The next two turned up at the wrong time as I had just bought my 1959 Chevrolet. Finally this one turned up on E-bay in mid-2009. It was a dream come true - a mostly original, fairly tired-looking car that was loaded with nifty options such as factory
Climate Dial air conditioning, electric windows, electric seat and radio. Usually these options are found only on the cheaper Mercury models. I have found that it is rare to find a Park Lane with such expensive options, probably because the basic car was already expensive and to add the options would have made it the same price as a Lincoln, so why would the astute buyer spend money on a Mercury with options when for the same price a luxury Lincoln could be in the driveway ? I was naturally thrilled to find this Park Lane and determined that it would be mine !
The seller very kindly agreed to assist me to ship the car to Australia if I were the winning bidder. He had also accumulated an awesome collection of spare parts and literature for the car and he again kindly agreed to my request to ship all the spare parts separately by airmail. Previous experience importing a car had taught me the hard way that parts placed in the boot of the car by the seller have little chance of arriving still in the boot. The spare parts and literature all arrived within a couple of weeks. There were some very large spare parts, such as a complete front and rear bumper set and some long trim pieces that could not be posted and so the seller put them in the back of the car and labelled them very, very clearly. Then came the long wait for the car. It arrived in Brisbane around Wednesday 23/09/2009 and had to pass through Customs. It was released by Customs on Thrusday 24/09/2009 and collected the following day by a man called John and taken to his car yard to await transport to Sydney. A man called Mal was hopefully going to deliver it to Sydney that weekend but couldn't fit it on his truck. He called the following Friday 02/10/2009 to collect it, and some other cars, and bring them to Sydney, however, Dave from the importer's phoned me on the Sunday 04/10/2009 and told me that Mal had spat the dummy on Friday and refused to transport any more American cars and had driven off and left them. So Dave hurriedly arranged another man called Keith to deliver mine and the other cars to Sydney and so it finally arrived at my home on Tuesday 06/10/2009 at about 11:30am.
First impressions ? What a crazy car ! It has all the wild and outlandish flashiness in real life that I thought it would. It has a lot of faults, in fact my friend John and I made a list of all the things that need doing and we got to 55 items ! We will firstly focus on things that will be required for the car to pass rego - fix the blinker stalk, fix the handbrake, fix the defroster, fix the instrument lights, fix number-plate lights, fix the wipers, fix the windscreen washer, fix cracked windows, replace engine and transmission mounts and replace the tyres. Then we can work on all the other nice-to-have things like a working clock, radio, air conditioner, heater, electric seat, replacement carpet, repaired seat fabric, dent removal, rust repair and painting. And so the list goes on.
For many reasons this will be our most ambitious restoration project yet. Firstly bodywork will be required to fix the various dings and the small amount of rust in the front quarter-panel. Secondly painting will be required - I'll let John do that ! Thirdly it's a more complex car than we have attempted before - for example the entire
Climate Dial heater, defroster and air conditioner is controlled by engine vacuum ! Fourthly our previous restorations have been popular collector cars like Holdens and Chevrolets. With those marques the restorer is spoiled by a wonderful range of reproduction and replacement parts. Late 1950s Mercuries are not highly collected and so reproduction parts are scant and wrecked cars to pillage are few. This means that we will most likely have to be creative with our restoration techniques.
Given that the 1958 Mercury is not hightly collected and that they were never sold in Australia, it is highly likely that I have the only 1958 Mercury in Australia.
