Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A truckload of Healey parts, a blizzard and disassembly begins!











The 26-foot long truck full of Healey parts mingles with my domestic crap that I moved from Iowa City, Iowa to Wisconsin. Karl looks somewhat bewildered at all of the rusty Healey parts. Karl and I were the second set of Healey rebuilders to get the large parts lot to complete our cars. These parts were originally part of a "quick sale" before a divorce in eastern Iowa back in 1992. My Iowa friends Tim and John rebuilt their Healeys (a 60 BT7 and a 62 tri-carb) from parts scavanged from this lot in the 90s. These pictures don't even begin to show the real nightmare of a story moving these parts entailed. It was March 1st 2002 and a huge snow storm was coming in and we were trying to load the truck and beat it. We lost the race. We drove out of Iowa City, Iowa at 25 mph all the way to Beloit, Wisconsin. I could not see out of the truck's windshield (1st picture) as it was covered with ice. From there we went on to Karl's house in Milwaukee. This four hour trip took 12 hours and I almost went off of the road dozens of times. Had that happened I had a contigency plan to abandone everything in place and jump into Karl's SUV.

The other pictures show the last time the Healey rolls for a long time. I fired up a generator to give us some electricity to work by as the storage facility had none. We tried to start the engine before we disassemble the car to see if it might run and to see what the oil pressure was. We could not get it started and gave up. Good thing, as we later found that there were several mouse nests inside of the ports of the cylinder head. My friend Karl is pictured helping me in the dissassembly process. Karl has a 1960 BT7. He found it in an apple orchard in SE Iowa for $500 in 2000 and it was rotten to the core. We made a new frame for it and reassembled the inner sheet metal and outer panels on it. It will be on the road in 2009.











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