I enjoyed Hank's article and felt it was a worthy addition to the wealth
of information of what makes an "M" an "M". Some of my favorite magazine
features are those that include the knowledge from those that were working at
Healey at the time. As a frequent purchaser from Fred Draper, it was good to
see one of his old letters.
As far as the bugeye goes, I think it
illustrates one aspect of "the hobby" ... a guy building his dream car. I
wouldn't do everything to my car that the builder did to that Sprite ... but
that's just it. It's his dream car, not mine. I'm not sure about the $100k
"invested" in the build. Seems like a lot of money and likely to perform as
well as some of my 401k investments over the years. But if you farm out a lot
of the work and with restoration shop costs being what they are, I suppose you
could run up a $100k bill. It's not a whole lot cheaper to do a high level
sprite restoration in a shop then it would be to do a big Healey resto and we
know they can run $100k pretty easily. As my first car was a bugeye and
having owned my present one for more than 35 years, I can identify with how
there is something about the Sprites that are just more "fun" than the big
Healeys. Although there are many Spridget builders doing concours
restorations, there also is a lot more latitude for folks to do their own
interpretation of the cars than in the big Healey camp where sticking to the
original plan is more the accepted norm.
But I think "the hobby" is
multi-faceted. There's plenty of room for those that want to do a faithful
recreation of the Healey from the day it was delivered to those who want to
add their own "personalizations" (I think that's a Lin Rose word that is
perfect for those of us who stray away from originality)
Rick
"Madman
in a death machine"
Follow My Nasty Boy Build: http://tinyurl.com/yj52fwo
________________________________
From: "editorgary@aol.com"
<editorgary@aol.com>
To: healeys@autox.team.net
Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2013
8:06 AM
Subject: Re: [Healeys] Something Controversial?
Picking up on
Perry's suggestions...
Does anyone understand what Hank Leach was on about in
his long article on
"The Real Truth About 100Ms" in the latest issue of
Austin-Healey Magazine?
What did you think about the $100,000 Sprite on the
front cover? In the spirit
of the hobby or proof that there's no limit to what
can be spent on something
if the owner's goal is to help the economy by
spending money?
Gary
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