Advice on buying a new (old) car

[xy500]

G'day
i was wondering if the huge pool of knowledge that is the ford forums could offer a youngster like me some advice on a car i am considering selling my xy to buy. Now i would just take the car to a mechanic but i'm very very tight for money.

The car i'm looking at is a 72 val charger, yeah i know its not a ford - if you want to kill me then just pretend you didnt read this! Also if your going tell me to buy something newer, forget it i'm only young once and i love my 70's muscle cars. It has the V8, i think its the 360 might be the 318, is setup to run on straight gas. Car is road registered, has beautiful straight body and all instruments and ancillaries are said to be working good, though i can't be sure as it has no battery atm.

Now the charger is my dream car, so i would put it above owning any other car purely out of preference, but i don't know enough about them to risk parting with my current car before making sure this thing will actually drive. i would just up and buy this car but it has a few problems i'm not sure of the fixability of:

No.1 the most major problem, the engine leaked water (apparently) from no 1 cylinder from the area where the head meets the block when it was last topped up with coolant after a trans rebuild, this leak happened when the system was under no pressure and engine wasn't running. the owner reckons it's a blown head gasket, but it sounds a little extreme for a blown head gasket to leak when the engine isn't even running? i dunno, you tell me? i realise this could mean cracked head/block etc. engine has not been run since leak was discovered.

No.2 car has been sitting for a year or so without being started up or driven, as well as being dry (no coolant, rust inhibitors or water in the cooling system and radiator).

No.3 there is a fair bit of oil under the hood and on the engine - must have an oil leak! duh... but thats bad cos it's gonna cost money to fix.

and then theres the little bits of rust here and there, but nowhere near as bad as my xy!

Other than that she's supposed to be all sweet, the transmission had just been reconditioned a year ago and she hasn't been run since.

Now i know all of this can be dealt with with the right sums of money and work. but i have very little money to work on it, and i will need the car as a daily driver (as it will be my only car) fairly soon after i buy it. so i was wondering if this seems like a trap where all my money disappears and i have no running car, or if theres light at the end of the tunnel and i should chase the dream!

my budget for working on this car after the price of purchase is $3000, and that is it, as in i cannot spend a cent more than that. this will need to cover an exhaust system from extractors back, as it has no exhaust system, a set of tyres as they are bald, a battery and the costs associated with replacing the headgasket or fixing whatever is making it undriveable.

thanks for your time, any advice would be much appreciated.