My father said his Jaguar mechanic(my father drives a 73XKE, since new, it's his baby) knew of a Morgan specialist, so we called him up and he came and picked up the car from New Jersey where it was and took it to his shop in Upstate New York. The called a few days later and offered to "take it off my hands" for a couple of grand. My alarm bells went off. I asked him what the car needed, and he sort of stuttered and said, "well, everything..."
He started in with the frame being totally rusted away, the engine needing complete rebuilding, completely replacing all brakes and lines...on and on. It just seemed fishy. So I went up there to his shop, about three hours north from me here in NYC, and took a look for myself. I found the frame had nothing but surface rust, and he had a car in the barn there in much worse shape, that he wanted $14,000 for. He would not give me any firm estimates on paper for any of the jobs he wanted to do. Replacing the frame would be "somewhere between $7 and $10 grand...if all goes well..." all this kind of thing. Basically, he seemed to want to either A) take the car off my hands for nothing and resell it for a big profit or B) take the car apart completely and then charge me whatever he wanted to put it back together. What he really needed, and what he really preferred to work with, was a "mark", a sucker, some doctor who has a big checkbook and no mechanical knowledge who would just blithely write checks until a $40k restoration was done. That ain't me, I have at least a LITTLE mechanical knowledge, and my checkbook ain't that large. At any rate, I did not feel comforatble with the guy at all. I told him I wanted to bring the car an hour south to Orange County Airport, where I have a couple of hangars I use for toy storage, and work on the car myself. Then he said he did not have a transporter, and I would have to pick it up myself. Funny...he had a transporter with his name painted on the side when he picked up the car in New Jersey the week before.
We settled on $500 for the "work done", which consisted of towing the car maybe 120 miles and spending an hour "inspecting it." A ripoff, sure, but I did not want to burn my bridges with the guy, as he is the biggest Morgan parts supplier in the USA, far as I can see....

So I paid it...