Mercury flathead

I found a 52 f-1 sitting in a salvage yard that had the cab and hood removed. the drive train was complete. the engine is supposed to run. it turns over. i stripped off the front clip and bed while i was at the salvage yard since i was getting this to put in my 31 tudor project. then loaded it on my trailer and headed home. when i got it home and looked at the engine a lot closer and i noticed it had Mercury spell out on the heads. is this better or worse than the ford flathead i thought i was buying?

 

If it's a Merc, it has the ultra-desirable 4" stroke crank. The heads are junk but you're gonna replace them anyways, right? Stock hp is 112.

 

If it's the late Merc flathead, it's 125 hp. The Mercury engines indeed had the 4" stroke which is big $ and desirable for hot flathead builders. Otherwise, the engine is identical to the Ford engine. All the Flathead speed **** and trannies and everything else will interchange with the Mercury. Only difference was the bigger crank and heads that said Mercury on them.

 

The distributer sticks up in the air like a new ford. it dosn't sit against the block like other flatheads i have seen. and it appears i will be changing the heads. thanks for the info.

 

I bought a flathead that came out of a 51 ford PU. It had the heads on it that said Mercury. Can you put Mercury heads on a ford??? I was wanting to make sure what my motor was.

 

like in this pic? Look under the generator....it's there. The earlier motors had them way down low off the crank.

 

Don't count your cubes til you've actually measured the stroke--all the heads are interchangeable and most surviving engines have been rebuilt with mixed parts somewhere along the last several decades.

 

My problem is that the motor is locked up tight. I pulled the heads off and oiled the cylinders down. Still nothing has budged yet.

 

Patience is the watchword. Take your time freeing it up. Oh, and the pistons are different between the Fords and Mercs because of the extra stroke.
Enjoy, you have what alot of people are dying to find

Flatman

 

I ***ume the motor is out of the truck? You will be better off to just go ahead and strip the engine now rather than screw around and try to get it to turn over. Pull the intake, the pan, drop the crank if you can get it out all the way and measure the stroke or look for the larger 5/8" cleanout on the front throw which usually says it is a 4" crank. You can also measure the large throw which would be 6"+ as opposed to the ford crank which is 5"+. I use PB Blaster on the pistons top and bottom and let it work a few days, with some fairly solid taps with a BFH and a rounded (soft on piston side) piece of wood. Keep the main caps in proper order and put back on the crank as soon as you can as it is awful easy to misplace them or lose the bolts which are hard to come by. Visually inspect the block, if it looks good, no big cracks running to the cylinders, etc., then have it hot tanked and magnafluxed. If it is a 4" crank make sure you keep the pistons which just about have to be merc's, and are 1/8" higher on the pin, in the right firing order as removed, this will make it a lot easier to re***emble. I would also, remove the valves and have them checked over to make sure they are not bent. Check your seats or have your machine shop do that for you, it usually don't cost that much (at least around my area). If all looks well you just need rings, bearings, and you are off to the races. Good luck.....

31acoupe

 

Bear in mind that it may not be locked on the pistons--it may be valves. Flatheads are known for stuck valves when they sit idle for long periods.

 

Pull all the valve keepers first, if its still locked, penitrate over the piston tops and a block of wood and rap the tops of all the pistons. The cast rings tend to eat into the cyl walls if left open to air to long.

Ive had two that I had to shatter one piston top to get it to roll over.

 

my dad uses a type of gun bore cleaner he gets a an old army store to free motors up, works better then anything else and takes about half the time....only thing bad is it smells up the whole garage and yourself for about a week.