Back in the late 70s while I was working at
Austin-Healey West, a buxomy mid-40s female customer had a 100 delivered to us that she found in an
Arid-Zona desert. The car was complete, weather worn and nearly 100% intact, but it needed
everything; the sheetmetal was almost 100% free of corrosion__and paint on flat horizontal surfaces__with just some rust-out in the triangles behind the doglegs, though it did have its share of mostly shallow storage dents.
The cylinder head was in the trunk...
We assessed the car's overall condition to make it road-worthy, as it wasn't going to be a total restoration (she apparently appreciated "patina" long before the rest of us in car collecting circles!) and the head was sent out to see if the crack between the #2 & #3 exhaust valves could be repaired. The project wouldn't start until a replacement was found, and the stack of rejected cylinder heads kept growing.
I left Ray's shop sometime in 1980 and went back to industrial electrical work before a repairable head was found, so I don't know the rest of the story, but I suppose that's why I never wanted to buy a 100. Nowadays, if you were lucky enough to come across a find like that, you could buy a brand new aluminum head for it (probably 8-times what that whole
desert 100 cost, but at least they're available); the spares and replacement parts scene was a lot different back then