This isn’t quite still a 1964 Mercury M-100 pickup truck, but mostly it is. Certainly it faces the world that way, as you can see here.
I dig the big M E R C U R Y callout…
…and the hood crest:
On first look, I thought the front turn signals were some kind of newer-than-1964 generic items, but a bit of image searching revealed no, that’s the kind they were built with—just one model year after Team Amber’s hard-fought victory in the Great Midcentury Turn Signal Colour War:
This truck’s seen a bunch of years and a bunch of miles (through September 1977) and kilometres (thereafter). Is that a replacement door?
And the right hoodside badge has gone missing:
But look at the details here. Sturdy chrome doorhandle with a round thumb-punch latch button, in accord with Scripture. Body lines match up pretty well:
This left view says the right door isn’t a replacement, so I guess the right front fender is what got swapped:
And the left hoodside badge is alive and gleaming:
I didn’t pay enough attention to figure out what kind of shifter that is; but I think it’s an automatic one.
There’s stuff in the bed, also in accord with scripture. I’m pretty sure driving around in a pickup truck with a clean bed with no parts or fluids in it is amongst the thou-shalt-nots. What’s that intake manifold for?
And here’s where the brand integrity of this p’ticular truck goes a bit soft: the bed’s from a Ford. Or at least the tailgate is, but given the continuity of paint I’m guessing the whole box got swapped.
Donno if Mercury trucks had their own taillights or if they used these cool Ford shield-shaped ones, but that’s what this truck has:
Just waiting to head off to tackle the next round of chores:
What might Snagglepuss have said about an almost-Mercury like this? We don’t have to guess:
Nice! It’s probably too late, but the idea of turning my ’66 F100 into a Mercury M100 is appealing.
The Custom Cab had some nice touches.
Snagglepuss AND a Mercury pick-em-up truck? This is the content I come here for…
If I remember my Canadian CC lessons, Mercury trucks, and also Fargo trucks, mostly existed because the “Sloan ladder”, that made so much sense in the US, made a lot less sense in the much smaller Canadian market, where having both a Ford and Mercury dealer in the same town would have been overkill.
Sometime it seems like more effort than was necessary was put into differentiating a Ford truck from a Mercury truck (or a Fargo from a Dodge) but at other times it feels like they did the bare minimum.
That’s my understanding, too.
FE block intake, maybe?
Yes it is.
Great find! I’d love to spot a Mercury truck if I were to go to Canada.
And I figured this ad would fit in nicely here — slightly older than your featured truck, but showing off that nice Mercury tailgate!
Beautiful photography Daniel. The faded orange and soft textures of the leaves contrasts so well with the light green sheet metal. Some of the best pics I’ve seen at CC, in some time!
Ford loved their parking lights inset into grilles, for decades. See the Mustang II, and 1979 LTD. I thought the embedded parking lights, made the nose and grilles unnecessarily untidy in appearance.
A quick Photoshop. I find the grille design on its own, looks cleaner, and more graphic, when unblemished. Always liked clear parking light lenses, with amber bulbs, when on chrome backgrounds. Gives a more subtle, and elegant appearance.
Those bold badges Ford placed on their truck hoods, looked simply awesome.
Great work!
As a little kid, the abstract pattern of Borden popsicle sticks, reminded me slightly of this grille design.
I had a large box of those popsicle sticks (Elsie sticks!) when I was a kid and my mom tried to convince me that they were BETTER than either LEGO or Tinkertoys…because they came free with the “food”.
No one was giving away free food with LEGO.
The 4 barrel intake is for a Ford FE engine. One of the few engines that had the valve cover attached to the cylinder head and intake manifold. That’s about 70 lbs of cast iron sliding around back there. Real pain in the back to pull and reinstall by yourself. God bless aluminum, knocks about 60 pounds off.
Back in the early ’80s, there was a M-250 4×4 that lived down the street from my brothers house.
I like it.
One of the things I remember from the one I owned was that the design had an unusual amount of really interesting body sculpting. Those doors had lots of little details to look at.
Stepside!!!! (Or Flareside in Ford Terminology)
The bed does appear to have been swapped….I wonder if it originally had a stepside bed or if it came from the factory with a styleside wide bed.
What would a stepside bed been called in Mercury terminology?
Another nice old rig .
-Nate
Nice find Daniel!
I love that “gear and lightning bolt” emblem. I think Ford should bring it back. They’d sell a ton of pickups if they all had that logo.
Oh, wait….
(Exit…Stage Left!)
The gear and lightning emblem normally meant that the truck had a six cylinder under the hood.
An “8” was added to the emblem if the truck had an 8 cylinder engine.