Last summer we were privleged to have a houseful of idiot frat-boys renting the house across the street from ours. At all hours of the day and night we got to hear drunken arguments between couples, fart-can burnouts from Fast And The Furious wannabes, motocross races on the front lawn, and parties until five in the morning. (These complaints courtesy of the man who used to blow out TV picture tubes with a baseball bat at 11pm in his rental backyard for kicks. Oh, how the tables have turned.) The lawn was mowed bimonthly, the driveway was jammed full of cars, and the gutter that blew halfway off during Isabel stayed stranded on the front lawn for four months. We cursed the owner for being such a lousy landlord, and had no way of contacting him to complain.

This morning I crossed the street with a camera and a cup of coffee to meet the owner, who led me into the cluttered garage to look at a pile of parts bungeed to the near wall: the front clip of the MGA, a transmission standing on its flywheel, various boxes of rubber and chrome parts laying on a leaning steel shelf, rusty wire wheels stacked next to a pair of old motorcycles. I was told the engine is in Columbia. As he pulled apart the jumbled parts to show me specific items, I recalled browsing the internet last night for information. I happened upon a great MGA site with a ton of excellent advice on buying and restoring old British iron, and one paragraph struck me. The author mentioned that actually putting the body and the frame right is relatively easy—if you have an eye for detail, the bodywork really isn’t that bad (just time-consuming, provided you have a MIG welder), and the running gear is always the easiest stuff to have fixed. It’s when the time comes to buy the chrome, trim, and leather to finish off the car that 50% or more of the total project price is spent.

Which, when I thought about it, made a lot of sense.

Given that the chrome I saw was very bad, and the rest of the finish was scattered around the garage in boxes and cans (and the frame was rusted, the nosecone looked like shit, the engine was in Columbia, etc.,) I decided I’d pass on this one as well. I didn’t even bother to take a picture to show you.