A very good New Year to all here...let's hope the one that begins today brings some better health than the one exiting. Otherwise, much to be done, so it looks like a full calendar going forward.
Mike, the Healey moniker is indeed linked to the last in a long line of clunkers that have passed through my/our hands over many years. The Old Man started my brothers and me off with various POS hauled home and unceremoniously left in or next to the garage to be returned to life. I was never sure if this was some sort of warped plan to keep us out of trouble, or simply to avoid subsidizing our pursuit of "wheels" during those teen years. We cycled through many of the great marques of Europe along the way: MG, Jaguar, VW, Mercedes, Volvo, Saab, Opel, Fiat, and a few others. Interspersed were a few American pony cars.
The Sprite came to me around 1990, having sat in a garage in Mt. Washington (Baltimore suburb), unloved and unused for more than a decade. My brother had gotten himself a well-worn 1971 MG-B some years before, and it had rekindled my interest. I always thought the Sprite/Midget was interesting, perhaps as close as one could come to "wearing" a car (at six-foot-four and 250+ pounds, it was everything I had to squeeze into the damn thing). We hauled it home, disassembled it, stripped it to bare metal, than began the long process of putting it all back together, renewing bits and welding in steel as required.
As Sarge will tell you, it is run scarcely enough, but it remains a good source of entertainment. This year we're going to double-down on getting it back to a state of consistent road-worthiness.
Here's a few pics from a some years back: