Fellow fiends:
My devil's advocate friend Brian (who still has a Healey 100/4 and a TVR
2500M for sale - shameless plug!) and I went to take a second look at the
'50 TD on Saturday. The short of it is that I'm not going to make an offer
on this particular car.
After some trouble we managed to get the thing to start (the gap was almost
closed, and the owner kept insisting on flooding the engine). After we
applied some starter fluid and diddled with the carb linkages it did turn
over. However, with the informed comments of my friend and with my own
'hands on' test drive, my opinion of the car was worsened by this second
visit (at least at asking price). There is a prety good knock in the
engine, the tranny obviously needs a rebuild (maybe a major one as it liked
to pop out of 1st gear and the synchros were very very very slow in 2,3 and
4), the electrics are not up to par (none of the lights worked), and there
is rot in the wood (though not pervasive). Both clutch and break hydraulics
need attention. Breaking was pretty poor, but that might be a simple
adjustment.
The principal issue then was that the owner seems unwilling to drop his
price much below the 9000+ range. Because I no longer view this car as a
rolling restoration project, and because I'm not looking for a non-rolling
restoration project, I think I'll leave this one alone. The owner would
have to come down *significantly* for me to remain interested, and I don't
think he is ready to do that (yet).
On the other hand, I remain quite interested in getting a T-car sooner or
later, and will continue my search at a fairly casual level of effort for
the time being. If I had my drothers I'd pick up a nice TC or 1500 TF for,
say, a thousand bucks ;-) Oh well... Maybe a nice early '60s Morgan +4
for just a few hundred more... To paraphrase Marlon Brando in "Streetcar
Named Desire"... "SANTA!!"
Cheers,
Will Zehring
P.S. Non-lbc content: why is it that the F1 championship has to be decided
by a crash early in the race, most years? That's right: my guy didn't win.
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