16th scale mercury panther

[kennb]

Some years ago I took a trip over to Flint Michigan chasing down some stories I heard and wanted to see how true they were. I went to see an old guy that used to work in Fords design department in the middle fifties. His name was Frank Osborn.The have a exploritiry group that worked on possible new cars that hopefully were going to be incuded in the 1957 lineup for Mercury, Know we know that Mercury was just a few years behind Ford in coming up with new models like the Cougar that took off after Muatang and based on the same platform.

Luckily I did find who I was looking for and he invited me in for coffee and reminessing about his days at Ford. Frank was there from 1949 to 1964 and had worked in the designs for the Thunderbird and Mustang. His many stroies about how they worked on the cars and the mock-ups were a great insight as to how it worked in his department, He talked about how Henry the II ,,,,better known to them as Hank the Duece,,,,,would come in and rant and rave over this project or that. One of Hanks pet projects had the code name of Zeuss, with in the Mercury division of Ford.

The had taken a look at how well Thunderbird was doing and thought that a Mercury of that size would do well also. This was early 1956 when they started working on drawing and mockups of what they w could do with the same platform and sub body framing. This ment to make it economical and could be run on the same line but with different sheet metal. A common practice back then. Hank would come in everyday and see the work being done and then make comments on haw to fix this or change that driving them all into a frenzie the rest of the day, Frank then went to the other room and came back with a folder filled with photos of what they were doing. If he had these in the fifties he would have been fired but he saved them from destruction just before he left Ford and retired in 1964.

He opened it up and showed me some amazing cars that were never released to the public in any way, Some were very far fetched and very strange even for that time period. My eyes fell on one photo,,,,,handwritten on the back was "project Zeuss". below that was the signature of Henry II. I took out a notebook and made some fast sketches and notes about this car. It was the same size and proportions of the 57 Thunderbird but looked very oddly like the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser,Frank explained that this was to be part of the new lineup for 57 but at the last minute Hank said it would be delayed for a while. It was too much of a risk and did not want to hurt the Thunderbird sales. The new market that was emerging in the late fifties was changing and with the 58 Edsel on the way they wanted to push the new brand name. Hank canned it and all the work was boxed up and the mock-ups were destroyed. Frank was able to locate and salvage the only known photo of the Zeuss but he would not let me have it.

[1930fordpickup]

This is going to be cool.

[slusher]

Something different. looking great..

[Danno]

Interesting!