1949 Mercury 4 door to 2 door....and more

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The first real logical area to start on the actual work was converting the 4 doors into 2. This post will show the steps I took to start that process.



Before any actual cutting of the doors, I first made side profile fixtures (one at the beltline as shown, and a second one at the middle of the door around the side moulding area. I did this knowing that I would be removing all the door skins from the door shells and would want to work on them off the vehicle and this would help keep the correct profile

I removed the skins because of the obvious reason of changing them to 2 doors, but also because of all the rust. It's best to separate all seams and joints and rebuild what I need, so I know I'm dealing with good metal.



Just showing this picture as a reference of the severe damage the driver's door had. The customer said that in the past they had accidently backed a piece of farm machinery into it.

(As a side note his grandfather purchased this Mercury new)



With the door skin off, I repaired the major damage as noted above.



Here you can see how the side profile jigs I made, help hold the floppy door skins in their correct shape. I aligned the doors and prepped the joint between the two.



Different view looking down the doors as they are clamped into the fixtures.



Once I decided upon the best visual length for the new doors, I cut the original rear door skin at the correct length.

Again I'm going to withhold the final door length I decided upon, but I will say it is not the length of a stock 2 door Mercury.



Back in the fixture it went again to weld up the joint between the two door skins. The fixture really was helpful here and will be for holding the doors properly when rebuilding the inner structure as well.



We now have our start on a 2 door Mercury!! As you may notice I also filled in the door handle and lock holes. Note: The bottom of the door skin is rusty and will need a new bottom fabricated later, but for now it's good enough to use to "rough in" our ideas.

This work was also done on the passenger side as well.