Hooh, boy, this is an easy one for me, but a story I really don't like to recall. I kick myself in the butt every night before I go to sleep, and have been doing so for 46 years.
I was working in an auto parts store in 1958, the summer after I graduated from high school. I was really poor. My widowed Mother and I shared a car, but I hadn't had one of my own. One of the mechanics who bought parts from the store offered me a car, if I was willing to do some work on it.
He took me to his shop and showed me a 1948 Nash Ambassador convertible. It was a mess. Someone had started to strip the paint, and over half of it was covered with surface rust. It had no front seats and no dash board or instruments. The brakes were shaky, and the engine wouldn't turn over. On the other hand, it had a new convertible top -- but the top motor was missing. It also had pretty good tires. Someone had intended to restore it (although it was only 10 years old at the time), had spent money on the wrong things first, and had abandoned it when the mechanical repairs were going to be too expensive. They gave the title to the mechanic to settle his bill.
He offered it to me for $20, which I'm sure was a token amount, even though it was probably the equivalent of about $200, today. He didn't know anything about it or Nashes in general.
I bought it, and slaved over it. The machinist at the parts store helped me tear down the engine. I literally "turned" the crankshaft by hand, laying under it for days with Emory cloth until I had the rod journals smooth and round. We installed new rod bearings, rings and did a valve job. I sanded the body and primed it. I went to the junkyard and got seats and a dashboard from an Ambassador coupe. I wondered why I didn't see any other convertibles, there, but I got a top motor from a '49 Chevy that I made work.
I started driving it, although there were two things I hadn't yet fixed. It needed a new starter button (under the clutch), so we push started it every time. We were young; that was no problem. And, it needed to have the wheel cylinders rebuilt -- there were minor leaks. While driving it, the generator went out, and I stopped at a Nash deal about 30 miles from home and had it rebuilt (they did things like that, back then).
Finally, I saved enough money to get wheel cylinder kits, a master cylinder kit and new brake hoses. I took it to a friend's gas station and worked on it out in the lot. When everything was rebuilt, I asked for his help to bleed the brakes. He hated to work on the ground under a car, so asked me to bring it in and put it on the lift. I reminded him that the self-starter wasn't working yet, and he offered to pull me with his truck to get it started.
For the first time since it was rebuilt, it didn't start in a couple of feet. He went faster, then ran out of driveway and jammed on his brakes. Of course, I had no brakes! He had forgotten why he was pulling me. I ran into the rear bumper of his truck and wrecked the front of the Nash. Hood, both fenders, bumper, grill, radiator, all wrecked. I knew it would take hundreds of dollars to fix it, even at junk yard prices. I didn't have the money.
I called the junk yard, and they came and got it. They paid me $17.50 for the scrap value. I probably had $125 in it by then. I cried, literally, tears running down my cheeks as they towed it away, but there was no other choice.
My favorite Aunt helped me buy a 1950 Chevy for $100, and life went on. About six months later, on a Sunday afternoon, my doorbell rang. At the door was a well dressed stranger; at the curb was a Nash Healy, the sports car built by Donald Healy using an Ambassador engine.
He introduced himself as the owner of the Nash dealership where I had the generator rebuilt. He said he wanted to buy my convertible. He said that Nash had only built true convertibles in 1941 (about 150 of them) and 1948 (about 300 of them /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif). He said they were so rare, he had never seen one until he saw mine; they were allocated to the dealerships, and his dealership didn't get one.
He said he wanted to buy it, and he would give me $1,000, in any condition. I told him it wasn't there at the time, but I would get back to him by Tuesday. On Monday morning, I was at the junk yard, bright and early, ready to by it back. In those days, junk yards rarely crushed cars. There were 30 years worth of Nashes there when I got my front seats and dash.
Of course, that Winter the junk yard owner decided he needed more space, and the Nashes had to go. My car had been crushed a few weeks before... /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif
Today, it's hard to even find a picture. Attached is a composite of a few I have found over the years. A conservative estimate would put today's price at about $20,000 or more.
