fordtrucks4ever
Jedi Trainee
Offline
About 15 years ago I was looking at big Healeys for sale locally. There were a lot showing up in running condition needing complete restorations. I remember looking at a couple in a British car mechanics shop. One was orange and even being badly weathered and dilapidated, did not look too bad as I approached it. The guy was throwing a hardcore sales pitch about the older restoration it had. He made a big spew on how minor the rust problems were for this type of car and didnt need much to bring it to very good condition. As I looked in th cockpit the floors were complete rotted out along with bottoms of both seats, doors, all around the gas tank, rear quarters and inner fender wells. Doors dropped really bad when opened and gaps didnt exist at all. The frame had bad scale and pitting. Just from the crunchy sounds when opening doors, I thought it would be prudent to get a Tetnus shot. Then came the big suprise. I opened the hood and noticed something major wrong. On the right side there was a repair about half way down length of the hood opening on the aluminum shroud. Someone had attempted to weld where it cracked all the way across to fender beading. The shroud piece was sharply creased down about 3 inches from actual body line. Welded back in that position. Then body filler was used to bring it back up. Even the lip where weatherstriping for hood was carved back in the 3 inch thick filler. It tapered back both directions and blended to existing lines. Wasnt noticable when hood was closed, but what a disaster. I could not understand why someone would attempt welding it back without bothering straightening to even remotely resemble actual body lines. To think, for only $14,000 I could drive it home. I walked away, needless to say there were no regrets.