[Healeys] What's your Healey, and what Healeys have you owned?

[HealeyRick]

Like a lot of us, my first car was a bugeye.  I bought it in 1967 from my
cousin for $350 that had been earned mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. 
It was cherry red (although the bloom had long gone off the cherry) with an
aftermarket hardtop that looked almost identical to the factory one.  It had
rust in all the usual places.  I did my first "restoration" painting it '68
Corvette yellow and sprayed on a black vinyl hardtop in a can.  I kept it for
a year, drove it through the winter and the summer before college and sold it
for the plushiness of a '62 Volvo 122S.  But the seed had been planted.

My
new bride found my second bugeye in a local shopping paper in 1977.  I bought
it from the original owner's niece.  He had bought the car while in the Army
in Germany and it still sports a tag on the right fender from the selling
dealer in Kassel.  It, too, had rust in all the usual places and I spent way
too much at the time to do a full restoration to the specs of the 1959 Sebring
cars.  I should have started out with a much better car, one of the hard
lessons we learn in restoration.  I still have that car (and the wife who
found it, too)  It's just a fun little car.

While I was in the middle of the
bugeye restoration, my Healey that got away story came about.  I had seen an
advertisement for a 100M for sale in New Hampshire for $5,500 (this would have
been about 1980)  I talked it over with Bill Wood and we confirmed it was a
genuine M.  It was a nice solid car, that needed a repaint.  I thought long
and hard about it, but decided I couldn't justify buying another car while the
bugeye was still in the middle of its resto.  Dumb, dumb, dumb!


I bought my
BJ7 in 1985 after spotting it at a friend's repair shop.  The original owner
wanted to sell it and it had only 24k miles on it.  But it was not one of your
original low mileage cars.  It had been turned into a SCCA racer in '65 and
then retired to the autocross circuit.  It's major advantage was it was rust
free, rare for a New England car.  I did an amateur restoration back to
original, but was kind of disappointed that the performance didn't match the
looks.

I had always wanted a Nasty Boy even before they were Nasty Boys.  A
local guy in high school had done a 289 conversion that cleaned up against the
muscle cars of the day.  I spent a lot of time pouring over the Hot Rod swaps
of the day and dragged around the Hot Rod Engine Swapping book for about 30
yrs before finally getting around to doing the change into the Nasty Boy in my
sig.




 
Rick


"Madman in a death machine"
Follow My Nasty Boy Build:
http://tinyurl.com/yj52fwo


----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Dimmock
<austin.healey at gmail.com>
To: healeys at autox.team.net
Cc: 
Sent: Wednesday,
August 29, 2012 7:43 AM
Subject: Re: [Healeys] What's your Healey, and what
Healeys have you owned?

Absolutely overwhelmed by the responses!

Add more
stories guys!!! And Girls!