‘Dad’s Merc’ awash in flames third time around

Larry Lough had a thing for flames on custom cars, especially on 1950s Mercury coupes. In fact, he liked the combination so well that he built his own 1950 Merc not once, but three times, each time adding more and more flames.

“Dad got this car out of Haysville about 35 years ago from a friend of his, John Griffin,” recalls his son, Tom Lough.

When the last incarnation began, the basically stock-bodied Merc had been painted purple and wore “bubble style” flames, he recalled.

“It still had the flathead engine in it and we really enjoyed driving it like that,” Tom Lough said. “Dad showed it quite a bit.”

But he thought the car needed something more, so he turned it over to Ron Pinkston and Big Al Gaither, doing business in the mid 2000s as Hooligan Hot Rods. It would be a five-year project.

“They chopped the top, suicided the doors, channeled it, reversed the hood and dropped it with air bags,” the younger Lough recalled.

Renowned Wichita customizer Dave Stuckey was called on to punch some ventilation into the forward-tilting hood and he obliged with 10 rows of perfectly spaced louvers.

Gaither, who now builds custom motorcycles as Riverside H-D Customs, handled most of the custom metal fabrication on the build. That includes a clean wraparound dashboard minus most of the usual clutter, with a Dakota Digital instrument panel incorporated into the windshield header above the driver’s head. A rear-view mirror blends seamlessly into the curve of that console, with twin outside rear-view mirrors sculpted into the tops of the door frames.

Roll pans replaced the stock bumpers front and rear and the rear license plate is frenched into the reworked deck lid. The headlights are likewise frenched into the front fenders, with a quartet of 1959 Cadillac bullet tail lights gracing the rear end.

Morgan-Burleigh upholstered not two, but four late-model GM bucket seats in supple cream-colored leather and stitched up a headliner to match. Vintage Air air-conditioning controls and vents are located on the uncluttered dash and a Lokar shifter sits atop the custom center console.

Under the hood resides a Ford 351 Windsor V-8 equipped with a polished Edelbrock intake and carburetor. It mates up to a C6 automatic transmission which sends power back to a narrowed 9-inch Ford rear end.

When it came time for the cosmetic work, Pinkston, an expert painter and pinstriper, took over and turned the Merc, with its 5-inch top chop, into a masterpiece.

He sprayed the entire car with a custom mix of candy pearl metal flake orange, which might have been enough for some people. But Larry Lough needed his flames.

Rocky Burris, who helped with the wiring, rear end and fine tuning on the project, recalled teasing Larry Lough about having Pinkston paint one of his cars with more flames than Lough had ordered up.

“He looked at Ronnie and said, ‘More flames!’ ” Burris chuckled.

And more flames he got.

The car is literally awash in purple, orange and yellow flames, flowing from the DeSoto grille up over the hood and fenders, down the sides and from the peak of the roof all the way back to the rear fenders.

“It took two days to tape off each individual flame,” Tom Lough noted. And the flames didn’t stop there.

They billow up across the firewall and the inner fender panels inside the engine bay.

“If you put this car on its top, you would see there are flames all the way back on the bottom, too,” Lough said.

Sadly, his father didn’t get to see his Merc completely finished before he died in 2010. The car didn’t have the windows in it or the final wheels and tires on it, but the paint job was in place and it was just what Larry Lough had hoped it would be, said Tom, who inherited the car.

He put the finishing touches on the magnificent Merc, deciding that the 20-inch wheels just didn’t look right with their thin “rubber band” tires.

“I wanted ’50s-style wheels,” Tom said, explaining that he had considered custom steel wheels with hubcaps and whitewall tires. But since the car has full-length lake pipes installed, he opted instead for old-style 18-inch Cragar 5-spoke mags.

“I wanted to keep all the chrome down low, so it wouldn’t detract from the paint,” he explained. He used Nitto tires that show more sidewall front and rear, 225x55x18R’s up front and 235x55x18R’s inside the rear-wheel wells. Baer disc brakes are used at all four corners, with air-ride suspension and Mustang II-style rack and pinion steering.

Tom Lough shares the car with his sister, Tammy Lough, who lives nearby.

“We call it ‘Dad’s Merc,’ ” he said, and it reminds them of their father each time they take it out.

Its first outing, it won five trophies at the Haysville Fall Festival Car Show.

“It’s not a daily driver. But we drove it over there because that’s what Dad would have done,” Tom said.

In four major competitive car shows, the Merc racked up no less than 16 trophies, he said.

Credit goes to everyone involved in the third makeover of the Mercury, but especially to the late Larry Lough, who had a crystal-clear vision of what a flamed custom Merc should look like.

This story was originally published September 8, 2016 at 1:31 PM with the headline "‘Dad’s Merc’ awash in flames third time around."