There's a solid line between cutting up some sheetmetal and bolting on a bunch of miscellaneous components, and building a custom. All you need for the former is a garage full of random parts, a car to bolt them onto, and the tools to do the damage. Building a custom, however, takes a lot of imagination and a good eye to make sure the proportions are perfect and the parts that weren't originally designed for the car look as though they were.
When enthusiasts in the Southeast need somebody with that kind of imagination and eye, they go to auto upholsterer Jim Gilbert. When we covered the Goodguys Nashville Nationals last summer, we ran across a bunch of beautiful customs with Jim's handiwork in their interiors. One of our favorites happened to be Jim's own ride, this '53 Mercury Monterey convertible. And in this case, his talent and taste extend beyond the interior to every corner of the car.
Jim didn't have to look far to find the Merc. It was owned by one of his best friends, Kelly Puckett, who kept it completely stock. A couple of years after buying the car, Jim sold it back to Kelly, still in its original condition. After another couple of years had passed, Jim repurchased it, still untouched, and brought it home.
Kelly said he didn't care who built the car, but that it needed to be done. "There's always room for one more nice car," were his words. Finally determined to customize the Merc, Jim decided that a complete body-off buildup was needed to make sure the car didn't just look right, but was built right too.
With the car apart, Jim could upgrade the frontend with a '70 Nova subframe. He widened the core support 5 inches to accommodate the larger radiator from a '69 Chevy big-block and hand-fabricated a new floor structure, braces, and body supports from the firewall to the trunk. The doors were too far gone to rebuild, so a pair of N.O.S. doors from a '54 Ford post-car was modified for the convertible, with the door tops removed and finished with the tops from the original Mercury doors. The cast convertible top frame was chopped 2 1/2 inches. All of this before he even got to the almost-too-many-to-name cosmetic modifications he made to convert the former stocker into a more-than-mild custom.
Jim finished the project in two and a half years at a budget less than under $20,000. We saw it for the first time in the dark parking lot of a Nashville hotel. Even in the dark, we could see there was a lot to look at. That was confirmed the next day, when we tracked it down and found it to be "one more nice car."