Austin Healey 3000

Austin Healey 3000

My first two cars were a blue 1961 Austin-Healey Mark I and a British Racing Green 1967 Austin Healey Mark III,  these photos are not of my "actual" cars but the ones I owned were identical except they were both in much worse condition than those pictured, even back when I bought them in 1970,  and in motion they were trailed by the characteristic cloud of oil smoke.  The 1967 was even in a music video:

ClickHereForAustinHealey3000MusicVideo

And if that song got you in the mood for 1985 click below to watch one of my favorite movie endings:

And if you want to see Curt Smith today click below:

I still love the styling but owning these two cars was a maintenance adventure that I never thought I would live long enough to laugh about.   Years later whenever the subject was raised my father would lament the twisted path that led us to these two rolling nightmares.  I would have to borrow most of the money from him.  He had passed on my purchasing a better condition one from somebody just down the street and by the time I managed to wear him down it had been sold.  I searched all over Cleveland to find the 1961 car and when it proved too unreliable to get me back & forth from college I was unable to sell it,  so we traded it in on the 1967 car whose defects would not surface for a few thousand miles.  Each time over the years when the Austin-Healey subject was raised,  I would remind my father that I had found and been ready to cut a deal on either a 1966 Ford Torino GT or a 1966 base model Roadrunner,  but he had killed the deals.  The cost of either of those two cars would be easily eclipsed by the financial hole created by just 18 months of Austin-Healey ownership.

Click here for:Disposing of my Austin-Healey

The personal poverty brought on by the second car would lead to my enlisting in the Air Force, there were other reasons but the car was the most critical.  Unless you have been there you have no idea the degree to which owning an albatross like a classic car can fill someone of moderate means with a daily sense of doom and gloom.  And the Air Force did solve my problem,  with orders to go overseas I was able to sell it to someone with whom I went through Basic Training.   Apparently the car had so addled my mind that I could not stop talking about it at Lackland and it piqued the interest of my fellow trainee.  When we ended up at nearby training bases in Texas he had me drive the car to his base so he could inspect it.  He agreed to buy it and I left it for him at the Dallas Airport when I shipped out.   Of course my father had to finance it and keep after him for monthly payments but Dad was so glad to get the thing out of his life that he did this with a minimum of complaining.  

There is a thin chrome bead that runs along the top of the fenders.  The main body panels are aluminum and the fenders steel so they could not be properly welded together.  The bead is the solution as it filled the gap between the two different types of metal.  Unfortunately the beading was long gone from mine and the gap had been filled with body putty.  The putty had cracked and my on-the-cheap repair was to rebondo the gap and to replace the rusted rocker panels, then repaint the car.  And with the help of an Ashland friend I was able to do a relatively decent job of it, finally repainting it in his garage.  Unfortunately while the execution was satisfactory the idea was ill-conceived.  It was only a matter of time until the new putty cracked;  and the rocker panels should have been bolted (or welded) to the frame rather than simply secured with wire screen and bondo - but doing this was impossible given the frame's rusted out condition (Cleveland cars are subjected to a lot of road salt).

This cockpit shot is actually a 1956 100-6,  but is almost identical to a Mark I.  Note the tonneau cover,  a wind drag feature now found mostly on pick-up truck beds.  Since raising the soft top required a lot of assembly, it was easier to just use the tonneau cover and to zip the drivers side down when you wanted to use the car.   Otherwise it was tempting to leave the soft top up as the only thing harder than assembling it was folding it up and fitting it into the allocated storage area. 

To be perfectly fair,  I only paid a few hundred dollars for the Mark I and the experience I received working on it that summer was worth the cost.  Had we simply written it off and junked or given away the car it would have been a productive learning experience.   But after being unable to sell it outright we tried to get something out of it in trade.  We left it overnight with the service manager of a BMW dealership in Cleveland. When he drove it home that night the electrical system shorted out.  Despite this they were willing to allow us a few hundred dollars in trade for the Mark III.   That should have told us to run!   Instead we did the trade and laid down some serious money on the Mark III.  After I left for college my father got a call from a guy who had bought the Mark I from the dealership.  Apparently he had been gently rear-ended at a traffic light,  his bumper was undamaged but the bondo had cracked the entire length of the car and one of the rocker panels had fallen off.  My father claimed no knowledge of what his nineteen year old son had done to the car.   The story gets a good laugh every time I tell it but I think most car tinkering guys who hear it also feel their stomach knotting up.

The coolest upgrade in the Mark III was the burl walnut dashboard.  They had a toggle switch to turn on the overdrive which saved gas.  Unfortunately my engine consumed more oil than gas and I would joke about pulling into a service station and telling the attendant to fill up the oil and check the gas.   About five months after purchase it required a ring job and I decided to have this done when I came home for Christmas break.  To cover the 600 miles from Kentucky to Cleveland I began the trip with twelve cans of oil and six cans of STP.   I had only one of each remaining when I reached my parents house.  I also managed a breakdown just outside Medina (after 580 miles) when the fuel line froze up just after nightfall.   I was able to baby it into a "closed for the night" service station.  I knocked on the door of a house across the street and the retired couple let me use their phone to call home.  We watched Peggy Lee on television while waiting for my mother to come down from Strongsville.  I left the keys with the couple and they agreed to explain the situation to the mechanic the next day so he could try to get it running and call me when it was ready.  Very nice folks!

Note that the battery is in the trunk,  I went over a speed bump once and the battery cracked along the bottom, the mounting brackets had not held it properly.  Acid was leaking out as I drove to the nearest gas station.  They replaced the battery and I paid for it with my new and until then unused "Humble Oil" credit card for which some guy in the dorm had convinced me to apply.  The first ever transaction on a credit card in my name.  Just one of the strange array of things that went wrong with this car.

Duel "SU" carbs,  the car had a hand pull throttle for idling speed adjustment.  The accelerator pedal was linked to a metal rod that ran along the top of the manifold and had a spoke going to each carb - it was all mechanically operated - nothing electronic.   The rod was held in place by a small clear plastic bracket mounted on the top of the engine - the rod was free to turn.  In this photo the rod is secured with a metal bracket.   One day I was gently rear ended in a parking lot,  there was no apparent damage and the driver of the other car left.   When I went to drive away I found that the accelerator was no longer functional.  Popping the hood I discovered that the plastic bracket had cracked off at its base,  apparently the force of the collision had been transferred through the car and when the rod pushed forward it broke the bracket.   I was able to improvise and drive the car using the hand throttle.  There was a old MG dealer a couple miles away in downtown Bowling Green,  I crept along in first gear at maximum idle to the dealer,  took the broken bracket to their parts department and amazingly they had a replacement in stock.  Apparently this weird engineering arrangement was standard for MG and Austin models with dual carbs.  This was the cheapest fix but strangest circumstance during my term of ownership.

A more expensive fix was required a few weeks later.  It needed new tie-rod ends and a friend in the dorm convinced me that the two of us could replace them ourselves, that he knew how.  He had a junked one at his parent's house in Louisville that he was working on;  which was true as I actually visited him and saw the car.  So I ordered the parts from J.C. Whitney and after they arrived I rounded him up for the project.  It turned out that he actually knew nothing more than I did about Austin-Healey front ends.  Seeing that our combined knowledge was just enough to be dangerous,  I remembered the MG dealer downtown and took it to them.  They did the job at a reasonable cost and the only bad part was learning that someone a few blocks away could have done the ring job a few months earlier for about half of what I had paid in Cleveland.

Another Austin Healey adventure can be found by clicking the box below: