Austin Healey

Healey Journal

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My Healey Project

I chose to resurrect a derelict, primarily because I wanted to enjoy the rebuilding effort myself and have the full opportunity to modify it to be a fast road car exactly as I wanted. Of course, this approach would allow me to sink vast sums into the project relatively gradually over a period of three to five years rather than suffer the immediate financial hemorrhage that an outright purchase would entail. Will doing it all myself save any money? Maybe, maybe not, but I'll have the pleasure of doing it myself and the ability to get exactly the Healey I want- or have no one to blame if I do not....

So now I can keep telling myself how much I'm enjoying the experience (of course I do, every single minute of it), and that the financial pain is less (of course it is, and finding other things to spend money on is hard), though much more prolonged than I'd originally thought.

Warning: buying a "project" is only for the truly committed: you're buying a car someone has owned, perhaps for several years and was intimately familiar with, and had REJECTED as being too challenging, too costly or too troublesome to do themselves. You are buying someone else's big problems and hope you're either more capable, more patient, better resourced or just plain more stubborn than they were... does that sound like a good or attractive bet????