Making a traditionally styled grille for your custom 1950 mercury

I did this little grille swap a few years ago on my Merc . It was pretty easy to do and although I replaced a really nice condition Desoto grille with this slightly more scrappy 1954 ford grille , I made this one myself so you know what they say . . . homed shit is always better than normal shit . First you take a decent condition grille from a 1954 Ford custom line . As long as it's straight , the chrome doesn't have to be perfect as you will more than likely redo the chrome at some point anyhow . You're going to have bare welds on it as well , so whatever .

You take that grille and measure a little here and there to figure out how wide it needs to be before you start chopping away at it . you can always make it smaller , but it's a lot more work to make it bigger again .

This is the bottom part of that grille , cut & trimmed and getting ready to weld .

Here's the top and bottom welded up and bolted back together again . Once the shape is where you want it you can clean it up a little or polish it some to make it look nicer . I never did manage to get the chrome done on this one .

Turns out it looks pretty nice in there , but maybe a little too simple .

Add a couple bullets from a 1951 Ford grille on the ends and we're off to the races . Like I said above , I had previously installed a mint condition 1955 Desoto grille in this car with working running lights and everything . I had to do a fair amount of work to make that one fit too , because of those huge bumper over riders that make the grille almost a foot too wide to go into the merc grille surround , without a good amount of trimming . I think this grille is pretty nice though , much more subtle and again , the whole idea that it was handmade . There isn't another one exactly like it on a car like this anywhere . That makes it cooler in my opinion .

I think it looks pretty nice , and apparently the current owner of that car does as well . It's been just like this since the day I sold it . I hope he throws some chrome on there at some point though , I think it deserves it !