GEOLOGIST RESTORES RARE GREEN GEM
Dad’s old hard hat the crowning jewel in Calgary man’s 1960 Mercury M250 4x4
Turning off the pavement, Cy Hadley stops to open the gate. After pulling through, he finds himself on a rough and rutted lease road. Hadley shifts his truck into four-wheel low and checks to make sure his yellow hard hat is secure on its hook before driving another 50 kilometres into the wilderness.
It’s just another day in the life of the Imperial Oil geologist, who worked during the 1950s and 1960s at a number of remote well sites across Canada. And it’s that exact scenario that inspired his son Scott to find and return to service the type of truck his father would have driven at that time in his life.
“My dad had a big influence on my career,” Calgary-based geologist Scott Hadley says. “When I was a young boy, I would go out to the rigs with him. He’d let me wear his hard hat and I thought that was pretty special.”
Cy gave Scott that very hard hat, and it’s the crowning jewel inside the younger Hadley’s recently completed 1960 Mercury M250 truck, which has the rare option of factory-fitted fourwheel drive.
“We take four-wheel drive pretty much for granted now,” Hadley says. “But back then, it wasn’t very common on production vehicles.”
In 1960, Ford/Mercury built 226,391 F100 to F-250 series trucks, and more than half of those featured a flush side box style. The number of F-250s built was 17,324, and of those, only 1,806 came from the factory with the four-wheel drive option. Of those 1,806, it’s likely only a fraction were built as Mercury M250 4x4s for the Canadian market, making them a very rare truck.
“Four-wheel drive was a $567.20 option on a $2,100.10 truck,” Hadley says, adding that 1959 was the first year Ford/ Mercury produced a factory-built 4x4. Before that, trucks were sent to companies such as NAPCO or Marmon Harrington for a fourwheel drive conversion.
That’s why, in 2013 when Hadley first became aware of the 4x4 1960 Mercury featured here, he was immediately interested. Originally sold new in Edmonton, the Mercury was in a private collection and wasn’t immediately available. Hadley had to wait three years to seal the deal, finally bringing the truck home late in 2016.
“I’m not a collector myself,” Hadley says. “I have a deal with my wife, Laura, that I have to let one go to get another one, and I’m more interested in driving them than making them museum pieces.”
But the finished Mercury is certainly museum quality. That’s because Hadley is a stickler for the fine details that go into making a vehicle showroom fresh.
When purchased, the Mercury had gone through an earlier restoration, but the interior hadn’t been touched and the bed was a mess. Also, some of the body panels weren’t as straight as they could have been. These were all issues Hadley set out to fix.
Working in his shop, he removed all badges and bumpers, which were sent to Alberta Plating. Hadley then took the truck to Peter Flannigan and his crew at Airdrie Maaco.
“I did a lot of prep work, and showed Peter and his team all the areas that needed to be addressed,” Hadley says. “They took the truck body apart, straightened everything, got an exact colour match on the correct Code G Meadowvale Green Metallic, and did a full respray and amazing wet sand and polish.”
When Hadley got the truck back, he was ready to install the re-chromed badges that he had spent hours detailing, painstakingly brushing in the correct red paint. He also restored the steering wheel and all other plastic components, including the shifter knobs.
“I re-etched the shift pattern and added the white paint,” Hadley says. “I liked to build models when I was a kid, and really enjoyed doing all of the little things, and that pays off on a vehicle like this — all of the small details make or break a restoration.”
An all-wood box liner was cut to fit and installed, while inside the Mercury, Hadley worked with DeGreeve Auto Upholstery of Calgary. Hadley performed all of the prep work on the metal seat frame, soda blasting it and painting it grey. Exact matches for the vinyl material for the seat and headliner were located and new pieces stitched to fit.
The 272-cubic inch Y-block V8 engine had been previously rebuilt, but Hadley cleaned it up and detailed everything under the hood, even installing a replica Mercury battery.
As purchased, the truck rolled on larger, incorrect tires. Hadley installed stock-specification rubber and replaced all of the shocks. The rest of the chassis, including steering linkages, was in fine shape but nothing escaped Hadley’s detail-oriented eye. Those details include many period accessories inside the cab and out, such as a 1960 Esso roadmap of Alberta, a Rotunda safety kit, Ford fire extinguisher, a jack, and an axe in the box.
Hadley’s work paid off at the recent 2018 Calgary World of Wheels, where the truck took first place in the Restored Pre1988 4x4 Truck class, in addition to being named Outstanding Truck at the show.
“I had a theme,” Hadley says. “I wanted the truck to look like it came right out of 1960 and was heading down an old oil and gas lease road.
“My dad is 86 and lives in London, Ont., and keeping his old hard hat in the truck reminds me of him, and in a way, he gets to come along for the ride.”