Emotionally bruised from that experience (someone had tried to abscond with my baby!) I let a few more years go buy. A divorce, a marriage, and a successful battle with cancer later, I was determined that I’d get the Healey done once and for all. That was the point that brought me into contact with Tom Kovacs of Fourintune fame. I convinced Tom and Kaye to visit my garage and assess the state of my Healey on their way home from the 2001 conclave in Grand Rapids. After five hours of walking around the car and grunting unintelligible sounds, and a promise that he could re-do anything that “wasn’t right”, we had a deal.   Passport Transport took my car (and about 12 bins of parts) to Cedarburg, Wisconsin in October of 2001. Thirteen months later, I was able to drive over with truck and rented trailer and return with my finally finished Healey. After thirty years, several false starts, and more money than I ever would have imagined, I finally had a Healey to be proud of. Now, if it were only warm enough to drive it!

My ThirtyYear Healey Odyssey.                                                                 By Jeff Maynard   It all started innocently enough on a day in 1972. I was restoring a 1949 MG TC, but a friend alerted me to an Austin Healey that was for sale “cheap”. I paid a visit to the seller’s garage, and while not one of the Healey 3000’s that several of my friends were driving, it looked similar….just older. “Had to be worth more than a 3000” I rationalized, probably fewer of them around. At least I had never seen one before. Forty eight hours later, it was in my garage and my checking account was $600 lighter. I remember that figure because it happened, at the time, to be my monthly pay as a hi-fi salesperson. (That’s what we called “stereo” back then, for those of you who passed your first driver’s test after 1980.)   Three children and several relocations later, the Healey and we found ourselves living in Southern California. The MG had been sold unfinished in 1980 - victim of too many obligations of parenting, and after all, the Healey did look a lot sexier.   By 1992, I was ready to get serious about actually finishing it. After all, I’d already owned it for 20 years and the grand total of the driving experience had been a trip around the block with no brakes (and no lights) the night that I first brought it home.   After a search of the L.A. area aircraft suppliers, I found a powder-coat oven large enough to accommodate an entire Healey chassis.  I think I may have been the first person to attempt to match Reno Red in powder coat. After a dozen or so sample runs (you never know what it’s going to look like until after it’s cooked), it was pretty close and I returned home with one almost Reno Red chassis and about a hundred black suspension parts.   Assembly of the rolling chassis and the mechanicals took about a month, and it was actually beginning to look like a car. The finished chassis complete with running engine and mechanicals was sent to a shop that specialized in Healey’s for bodywork and finishing. About the time that the body was complete and in primer, another job-related relocation called me to Minnesota.   I left the Healey in California as I was building a new home in Minnesota, and there was no place to keep it until the house was finished. One morning during the ensuing six months I woke to hear about the “catastrophic Northridge earthquake”. Northridge was all of four miles from my Healey! It turned out that the building that my Healey was stored in had collapsed in the quake. Good news was that the car was moved five days before the fateful morning!   Several months later, the house was done and my Healey was on the way to Minnesota. Now the question was, “Who can finish my car after 20 years?” After a several year search, I found a shop in central Minnesota that specialized in Jaguars and “other English cars”. I won’t bore you with the gory details of this chapter of the “Thirty Year Odyssey”, but the Healey went out and back within 24 hours. Chalk that one up to not doing one’s homework!