I will confess I did contemplate leaving this car exactly how it was restored in Australia and bringing it to the Austin Healey enclave just how it was restored by the prior owner. It was that nice.

After much soul-searching searching, however, I re-committed to making car number one exactly accurate. Tony in Australia (prior owner) built this car to be a driver he could show and drive anywhere. He did beautiful work and installed a number of wonderful features (such as disk brakes) to make the car more drivable than ever… but my vision for this car is that it would look exactly the way it looked when it was brand new, which would preclude any modifications.

It has begun! We’ve hit day number two, or as we call it at Bugeyeguys, “disassembly day!” We ripped apart a perfectly fine and restored Bugeye to get it back to 1958 specifications, as it would have been the day that it left the factory.

In the video below, we point out some of the differences between the very early Bugeyes and the later versions – take a look and follow along!

The most important result this week is that we now have our proper red oxide coating in the boot of our 501 Sprite and can begin to next assemble all of the rear end components. If you’re unfamiliar, original Frogeyes had red oxide on the interior of the body that was then painted body color on top of that which meant that looking inside the boot you would see traces of this red oxide, particularly on the top of the boot. Our car was painted green throughout when recently restored in Australia so this was technically incorrect and we wanted to repair this and that’s a big reason why we took everything apart especially in the back end of the car.

Now that the red oxide is laid down we can layer on top all of the various fabrics and bolts that would have come later in manufacturing to make it an accurate car for the Concours Judging to come.