Further Adventures With The Mercury

After a 35 mm rainfall last night it was too wet for much else but to work on the new seat installation in the 52 Merc today. Since I know readers are hungry  for more details of resurrecting this rusty relic I will bring you up to date. The "new to me" seat is from another much newer vehicle. It took a lot of measuring and hunting up scrap iron to fashion a sturdy base for the new seat. Plus a little backing so it did not fall through the rusty floor. I exaggerate, but only a little.
Way more comfortable seat now and I can retire the "Winston Wolf" seat cover. I am no great colour co-ordinator but I'd say the new seat grey is a pretty good match for the rest of the remaining original interior of the car.
Today's test run went well. I had a (actually 3) co-pilots ride along for some stills and video which might eventually make it to my youtube channel.
You really need to hear this video on a tv with a good sound system. The sound of that old straight piped flathead V8 is absolutely awesome, at least to my somewhat biased ears. The car has a lot of sound and fury but not a whole lot of go power. At a factory rating of 125 horsepower when new I guess we can't expect neck snapping acceleration.
My brother, the real mechanic in the family did a little fine tuning on the ignition system after today's run and I'm thinking the next test run should prove more impressive performance. A little advance on the "loadatmatic" distributor timing plus increasing the points gap certainly improved the low end performance but I think another road test is in order to see just how much it has improved.

Today's "drive by".