Antique & Classic Cars Blog
Friday, February 27th, 2009
A reader emailed on the Marquis deSoto, ruminating on whether the complete Mercury was still under there. This prompted a little detective work on this cool car. The NYT piece describes it as a ‘98 Mercury Marquis blended with a ‘57 deSoto and 10 other classic cars.
Here’s what I see so far: it looks like the interior, top, front doors, mirrors and rockers are (mostly) Mercury. The center of the hood looks Mercury too. Then what do we have?
‘58 Lincoln headlights
Dagmar portion of a ‘56 Caddy front bumper
‘57 DeSoto fins, lights, back bumper and trunk lid
‘57 Buick bodyside chrome trim and portals
Anything else stand out for anyone?
3 Responses to ""
Description
As a custom car finatic since childhood, I’ve always wanted to “do” a new car. My dream come true started as a 40,000 mile always garaged 1998 Mercury Grand Marquis from Florida. After stripping the bumpers, lights, and other extraneous parts, I started welding on the parts from eleven different 1950’s cars: 1-1957 De Soto fins, taillights, rear bumper, and decklid. 2-1958 Lincoln front fender tops and headlights. 3-1953 Pontiac roof panels to fabricate the wheel openings 4-1957 Buick side trim 5-1955 Cadillac front bumper 6-1957 Corvette grille (actually, 2 grilles with 11 extra teeth) 7-1959 Cadillac turn signals 8-1948 Dodge cornering lights 9-1965 Buick trunk lid turned backwards as front edge of hood 10-1958 Cadillac hood upside down for front roll pan 11-1994 Ford pick-up gas door I then painted the car the greatest ’50’s color combo, turquoise and white.All this work was done outside in my driveway by myself and my able assistant, Mike Karpf. The car is a total pleasure to drive, has all the modern amenities and airbags, and gets 24M.P.G. at 80 M.P.H.
Frank,
You have a gift to be able to do this with vision and the skill to carry it out. It sounds like one very radical car. I would like to attempt one someday but my luck would be that the car would dog leg down the road as the hood flys open and turning the steering also changes stations on the radio.
When I returned to the classroom in 2005 to teach a writing class at MCAD, I was struck that everyone had a laptop.
It would be interesting to talk to some teachers who have bridged the computer era to learn how having information at your fingertips changes the way we learn. In childhood I had probably 30 phone numbers memorized; now, I lose my phone and I can’t contact anyone until they call me first.
In cities, I’m used to giving directions using compass points. Now that satellite navigation is the rage, I wonder if that skill will diminish too.
Frank found a thorough answer to the puzzle. A good Google search is worth a thousand hardbound volumes. :^)
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MotorMouth Kris Palmer, freelance auto writer and editor, blogs about vintage cars, the collectible auto scene and just about anything else that goes vroom.
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