Does anyone know why a Ford Galaxie would have been built from the factory with a Mercury Marauder 390 cu. in. V8, and not a Thunderbird 390? Like this one with the Thunderbird 390, for example: '64 Ford Galaxie Convertible on eBay - Fredericksburg, TX This Ford Galaxie caught my eye - not that I can afford it, the way the bidding seems to be going - and I saw that it has a Mercury Marauder engine. Curious, I thought. '64 Ford Galaxie 500 Convertible on eBay - Ashville, NY
It's the car in Ashville, NY that has the Mercury Marauder. The ad says: THIS CAR IS EQUIPTED WITH A RARE FACTORY OPTION!! It came with a MERCURY SUPER MARAUDER BIG BLOCK 300 HP 390 ENGINE ( Mostly ordered for Police cars ) The Fredericksburg, TX convertible - also a nice car, by the way - has a Thunderbird 390.
My first impression was that someone just replaced the valve covers with those from a Mercury Marauder ... but then I thought there might be an interesting bit of Ford Galaxie trivia here that I wasn't aware of ... :confused:
Sounds very unlikely to me. The Ford and Mercury cop 390's were the same exact engines except for the name and valve covers. Ford used the Thunderbird engine in the cop cars so what's the point of ordering a Merc cop engine?, if it was even possible. Either they ran out of Ford valve covers for a short time at the assembly plant and used the Mercury type, the engine was changed and they didn't swap over the Ford covers, or somebody just changed the valve covers for some strange reason.
That's pretty much what I thought but I thought there might be some unusual Ford history behind this. Probably not. If I had the money, I would buy this rare car - the only one in the world with a Mercury Marauder 390! - and also buy that rare "Camaro station wagon" that we saw on this forum not too long ago.
Here's more strange Ford/Mercury engine stuff. There are at least a couple documented 66 Ford Custom Virginia state police cars that had Mercury 410s. I've been in contact with Tom Yanulaytis who runs the 66 Ford Full-size Registries http://66ford.fordregistries.com/, and he said he has two 410-powered Ford police cars in his database (he has not updated his site in quite some time though). Here is one of them. This car had been on eBay a couple times this year: http://www.oldride.com/classic_cars/759757.html The trim tag shows M for the engine code, which was the 410 on Mercury trim tags. Not surprising since you could custom order nearly anything back then. And here is some interesting info that John Rotella of Lovefords.org had passed on to Tom about the Merc 410-powered Ford police cars and 410s in general: "I have never actually seen a 410 engine installed in a Ford before. There is the 6-digit DSO number which points out its true special-order status...And, another very interesting thing about this Ford with a 410 V-8 is that Mercurys were not built at Norfolk as this car was. So it wasn't a matter of merely installing an engine that was already easily available in the assembly plant (like Wayne, where both Fords and Mercurys were built)."
^^ My take on that is there would be no reason to put the Merc 410 in the cars instead of the comparable spec Ford 390, unless there was possibly a temporary shortage of 390's when this vehicle was approaching its build date. Ford merely substituted the Merc 410 instead.
Back in 66-67,Touhy Ave. Motors in Park Ridge had a BS Green Park Lane Hardtop - 410 with a 4-speed. Musta had a road gear, as the salesman was screaming when I hit 90 in 3rd! Screamed louder when I went sideways in a Comet GTA, and drove out of it, though! Shoulda seen his face when I looked at the Pantera!! Ahhhh, the good old days!
