Welcome from sunny Southers California!
Yes, they do seem to breed - though they are harder to find these days, as
evidenced by how mant have to travel here by boat. At one time I had as
many as 7 in use and stored away, and I lived in a one bedroom apartment in
San Francisco!!! Car storage cost me 410 per space, per month which allowed
me to collect up to 12 cars at a time. I once had things as diverse as
Minors, a 59 Chevy El Camino, a Nash/Austin Metropolitan, a 1950 Plymouth
business coupe and a 1964 Buick Riviera all tucked away waiting for this
and that.
Tip:
Try not to get in this situation - if you collect too many, you have no
money to finish ANY of them!
Back in the early 1970s you could buy a really nice Minor for well under
$1000 US. In 1973, I attended my first Morris Owners Assoc. of California
meeting with my recently purchased 24,000 original mile, $600 pearl gray
convertible. It was the hit of the meet (about 32 cars!), but I learned a
while later that the guys refered to me as "the rich guy" because I spent
so much on my car. See, most of the members were buying clean rust and
rot-free Travellers with bad gearboxes for $150! Ragtops for $50! Then
walking into breakers yards and buying low mile 1275s/ribcases out of late
model Midgets for another 250 bucks and screwing together budget bombs that
looked good and went almost as well as Japanese economy cars for under 500
1973 dollars - hence the "rich guy" comments.
We even had a guy called Ed Landwher who developed the first Midget disc
brake adapters and guys who were fitting air conditioning out of Austin
Americas (1100/1300 in Europe)! Parts were still available at the
dealerships, local import parts houses and a lot of the stuff that Moss
sold for T-series MGs fit and the wreckers were full of low mile British
cars to pick apart. I remember members buying $200 good-running Spidgets
with body damage and parting the whole thing into clean old Minors.
They were much easier to collect when they cost so little - they were also
easier to resell at those prices. Today, thirty years later the Minor is
still the same sort of bargain when compared to a 57 Chevy or an E-type Jag
but they are much harder to find and the parts situation is a bit more
complicated.
I still have that low mile convertible - now has 43,000 on the clock, 32
years later.
Welcome aboard!
Cheers,
Rick Feibusch
Venice Beach, California
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