There’s a ton to write about but I haven’t had the time yet. While you wait, here’s a cool picture:
My father-in-law said he knew Duke Cunningham and said he was a self-centered prick. Fuck that guy. Great photo, though.
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Broken Brakes
Sometimes you have a workday where everything seems to fall in place and work correctly, and sometimes you finish the day where it feels like nothing was accomplished. This weekend was mostly the latter. I spent just about the entire weekend on the brake situation in the Travelall, and as of right now I still don’t have anything to show for it.
I started by doing a short test run to get the truck warm, and then brought it back to the driveway to check the drums. The driver’s front was the hottest, so I put the entire truck up on stands and pulled all four wheels. Each drum was warm to the touch and didn’t spin freely, which told me they weren’t releasing properly. So I bled them starting at the far corner with my daughter’s help, put the wheels back on, dropped it onto the ground, and did another test run.
After the second run the drums were still hot, which pointed to a possible problem with the master cylinder. When I originally replaced it, I bled it on the truck instead of the bench (rookie mistake), so I figured maybe there was air still trapped in the cylinder. I rigged up a bleed tube, disconnected the brake system, and bled it out again. I did get some air out of it before it went clear, so I figured maybe I was home free. After dropping it back on the ground, I bled it at the wheels again and prepped it for a test run.
Sunday morning I took it back out for a drive, and back in the driveway I found that the driver’s front drum was still hot to the touch. This was frustrating, but I kept my cool. I figured I would replace the only two elements that still exist from the original brake system: a long hardline going from the prop valve to the rear axle and another going across the front of the frame to the passenger front wheel. As I’ve bled the system the fluid has been coming out dirty, so there’s a good chance there’s some crud in those lines that isn’t letting the pressure release.
I tackled the long line first, and was lucky to have just enough left to reach— it’s 9 feet in total—so I ordered another length of 1/4″ line from Prime and got to work heating and cooling and heating and cooling the fittings. The rear fitting came out relatively easily but it took an hour of patiently working on the front fitting before I felt brave enough to put a wrench on it. While that was happening I pulled the old line off and used the needle-scaler to remove surface rust on the inside of the frame rail behind the mounting points, and hit it with Rust Encapsulator. Then I put the new line in place, double-flaring the ends, and tidied up the wiring on that side.
Up at the prop valve, I decided to split the line and slide a box-head wrench up to the nut so that I was getting all the contact area possible, and then with one mighty heave, it came loose. After that it was relatively easy to double-flare the other end and tighten it on the valve.
By this time it was getting dark, but I worked until about 8PM heating and loosening the nut on the other side of the valve and pulling all of the retaining clips off of the frame. While I was under the truck I tidied up the wiring on the passenger side and found that when I’d re-connected the gas tank sender wire I never covered it with anything (there was an unused section of heat shrink tube on the wire, so I had all the best intentions) so I cleaned those connections for testing later.
The front line is going to take hours, I suspect. It’s in a difficult location to get to. The end of the line is mounted up on the frame behind the tire, right next to the starter, so there’s little room to move. I suspect I’ll have to remove the starter and spend a lot of time heating and juicing that line as well.
If this isn’t the issue, the way I see it there are only two things left that could be the problem: the short soft line going from the master cylinder to the prop valve, or the master cylinder itself. I’m thinking I’m going to order the soft line just to rule it out (it’s pretty cheap in any case) before spending $80 on another master cylinder, just to make sure I’m not firing the parts cannon prematurely.
Going Back To Cali
The 800 has been an enigma since I bought it. There is no documentation on it anywhere, and I didn’t get any paperwork from Dan’s family (who do not seem to be in any hurry to find any, strangely). But there are two stickers on the truck which hint at a little history.
The first is a Carlisle truck show sticker from 2006, which may well have been the last time this thing traveled anywhere before Dan parked it.
The second is an inventory sticker from Allied Equipment Co., which was placed on the firewall directly above where the data plate would have been screwed in. Allied Equipment was an International dealer based in California, with branches in Fresno, Reedley, Madison, Five Points, and Tranquility. They had an original Loewy-designed showroom in Five Points which looked like this:
And according to the International Dealers of the Past website, the building still exists.
New Friends and Priorities
I had a very nice fellow contact me through the YouTube channel when he spied the tailgate from the Green Travelall in the background of a recent video, asking if it’s still available. We traded a few emails and then talked via phone on Saturday morning. He’s got a Travelall of his own, and it’s been sitting for a while, but he said my videos have gotten him inspired to pick things back up again. He’s based in Michigan but drives east quite often, so we’re going to try to meet up somewhere to make a deal. It’s always cool to hear from people who like the videos (sometimes it feels like I’m doing them for myself only) and I’m happy that my low-key self promotion has yielded new friendships.
As I do in the middle of each week, I’m going to make a list of stuff to tackle next:
- The first and most important job is going to be sorting out the brakes on the Travelall. I want to solve the sticky brake issue once and for all so I can drive the damn thing long-distance without fear. So the order of diagnosis will be to pull the drums off, starting with the driver’s front, and:
- Back the adjusters way off so that they’re not so grabby.
- Check each of the cylinders to make sure they’re moving both directions freely and not leaking.
- Bleed the system again.
- If all else fails, I’ll replace the long line going from the prop valve back to the rear axle, which is the only one that hasn’t been touched.
- Then I’m going to pull out the buffing wheel and run it with some cutting compound on the hood to see if I can add a little sparkle to some of the remaining paint, as well as pull off some of the peeling clearcoat. That might church up the truck a little bit.
- Check the wire to the fuel tank sender and see if it’s still connected. I’d like to have my fuel gauge working again.
- While I’m behind the dashboard, I’ve got to ground the light on the right side of the panel, and add some light-blocking material around the edges of the panel.
- Wire the electric fuel pump in to the ignition circuit more permanently. Right now it’s running off alligator clips, which is janky.
Sort out the vacuum lines on the 800.They are currently all over the place and disconnected in a way that makes no sense to me, and I suspect this is the reason the truck is dying on acceleration—much like the Travelall did before I hooked the main vacuum line back up to the carb. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Scout 800 service manual and 3 of the 4 service manuals I do have don’t cover the 196 engine at all, while the fourth only briefly talks about the carburetor and provides no vacuum line diagram. The interwebs have been no help so far either, but a deeper search is in progress.- I fooled around with this Thursday evening: There were two hoses in question teeing off the side of the manifold. The first was a narrow black hose that was just long enough to reach the vacuum advance port on the distributor. I put a fitting together from my spares and connected it back up, and we’ll see if that helps any. The second was a larger red hose that led to the PCV on the valve cover, which I’d removed to get the cover off. With this hose plugged the engine wanted to die, but I figure I’ve got to adjust the timing with it connected to get the engine running properly, so I hooked it back up for now.
- Wire the electric fuel pump up with an inline fuse to the ignition circuit on the 800 as well. I don’t see mysef springing for a mechanical pump anytime soon—and a rebuild kit for the one I have is three times the cost of a new one—so the electric pump will do for now.
- Pick up another tube of TankWeld and keep chasing the leaks on the fuel tank down. I’ve got the major holes filled but I’m finding new pinholes here and there.
- Stop out at Brian’s place to run up Peer Pressure, drop off my generator for him to look over, and grab my spare PCV valve and tow straps from the truck.
I’m hoping to get the Travelall sorted out so that I can drive her across the bridge to Brian’s place next week for some EV work, but that’s going to take a series of 5-10-50 trips locally to shake out the bugs. Alternately, I’ll ferry the OG-V over to swap it for the Scout, weather permitting.
Total Scout 800 costs to date:
Weekend Recap, 23 March
This weekend was Travelall-focused, mainly, because I wanted to get her running properly now that Peer Pressure is stored at Brian’s house. The engine was running but bogging down on acceleration, which pointed me back to water being in the gas, so the first thing I did was disconnect the fuel pump, point it into a bucket, and let it run for a minute. When that gas had settled, there was indeed water at the bottom, so I started draining the tank into buckets again. collecting about 7 gallons and filtering it through an old T-shirt into another bucket. By the time the gas ran clear I had about half a pint of water collected, which certainly would explain the issues I was having. With that done, I mixed in a half a bottle of HEET and replaced the gas, then ran the pump again to make sure there wasn’t any more water. Then I took her for a test drive. The stumble was gone and she ran well, but the idle was very high.
I plugged in my garage-sale engine tester and vacuum gauge and brought the idle screw way down to hover at about 700RPM, which is a much happier place to be. On the second test drive, she ran like a dream. I took her for a longer trip but found that my brake issue is back: longer trips heat the drums up, which tells me there’s a blockage in the lines somewhere. This is puzzling because I’ve replaced all of the soft lines—usually in cases like this a soft line has swelled internally so that when pressure is applied it’s forced through the blockage but doesn’t have enough power to go back the other way. So I’ve got to figure out what’s going on there.
While I was waiting on the tank to drain, I sprayed the engine bay of the 800 with oven cleaner and hit it with the pressure washer. When I was done I’d blasted about five pounds of dirt and grease off of the truck, and found that I could see the firewall, engine block, and suspension clearly for the first time. Another thing I’d done during last week was to take one of my spare valve covers, wire wheel it, and spray it with IH Implement Red. After replacing the original, the engine bay looks 13% less redneck.
With the engine a little cleaner, I pulled the truck forward and drained the oil. It came out black with a little water at the bottom—but this could have been from me spraying it with the PCV valve open. I took a sample for Blackstone Labs, pulled the cartridge-style oil filter off (first time I’ve ever dealt with one of these) and put a new one in. Then I refilled it with Rotella diesel 10-W40. Hopefully that will help clean the engine out a bit.
I also pulled the driver’s tank out of the 800 last week to find it’s in slightly better shape than the passenger side, so I spent $12 on some fiberglass screen patches and a tube of TankWeld and started glooping it on the visible holes after wire-wheeling the edges. After two liquid tests I found I still had some pinholes, so I’ve got to keep working on it.
Meanwhile, here’s a recap video from two weeks ago:
Lit, Part One
I snuck out to the garage after doing the dishes last night and messed around with some of the electrics, inspired by the fact that the license plate light actually worked. Within about a half an hour, I pulled both of the taillight buckets, swapped them out for some better examples in my spares, cleaned the wiring contacts, and got them both working. The front running lights are in worse shape. I had to pull the front bumper off to access them, and found that it weighs a metric ton. It’s made out of 1/2″ thick C-channel and I would hate to be the car on the other side of it in an accident. One of the buckets came out easily but the other is held in with a rusted screw which needs to be extracted.
Finally, now that I can open the driver’s door all the way, I hit all of the retaining screws with penetrant, pulled them out, propped the door up, and screwed it in tight. It now closes almost cleanly, but the door striker needs to be taken apart and lubricated.
Bill’s House of Internationals
Sunday morning update: the Danscout is out of the backyard and safely tucked in the garage! I spent the bulk of yesterday replacing the wheel cylinders, soft lines, and cleaning out the roached pads and drums, capping off the rear brakes, and bleeding the system. I had to spend more time than I wanted futzing with one of the brake cylinders for a while. The threads hadn’t been cut deep enough to make a solid connection with the flare, so I had to double-flare it to make it thicker, and that finally worked. After capping off the rears, I had my daughter help me bleed it out enough to engage the fronts, which was all I needed to move it around the house without fear of driving through the neighbors’ fence. (That drunk fence in the background of my pictures is theirs, but whoever installed it only poured the footers about 4″ deep, so they’ve heaved over the years and come out. I’ve straightened it twice with the Scout and some chains but finally gave up.)
Then I mixed up some antifreeze and topped off the radiator, glad to see it held liquid and didn’t pee out all over everything. After moving all of my tools out of the way, I fired it up and eased it into gear. I think the clutch is pretty well roached, because it only engages at the very end of the pedal throw, but it does engage. I got it around the house, down onto the driveway, and backed it down to the front of the garage for a quick pressure-wash. Most of the dirt, mold, and at least 1/4 of the paint came off pretty easily. I still can’t tell what color this thing was originally, but I believe it was Light Yellow, and then someone hand-brushed another similar coat of yellow over that. The pressure wash blew a lot of the yellow off to reveal gray primer (or perhaps Aspen Green Metallic?) underneath.
With the dirt on the outside cleaned off, I let it dry out and then backed it into the garage. The plan now is to store Peer Pressure in my friend Brian’s spare garage bay for a while as I get the 800 sorted, and swap the Travelall in and out of there to keep both trucks lubricated and running. I’m going to rob the battery from PP to run the 800 for now with the intention of working on it while spending as little as possible.
Before closing up for the night I cut some scrap 14 ga. steel down and made a fuel pump blockoff plate after noticing I’d puked a bunch of oil out of the open hole. This coming week I’m going to drain the remaining oil out and send some away to Blackstone for analysis—I’m curious to see what they can tell me about the health of this engine. I will say that it’s strong and happy to idle, in spite of the fact that I’ve done absolutely no adjustments to the carb or distributor since re-stabbing it. One thing that does need adjustment is the amount of fuel pressure; I’ve got it closed down to 2psi through the regulator, but every time I got on the gas it felt like it was draining the bowl and I’d have to wait until it refilled to be able to get the RPMs up again.
One other funny thing I noticed after I’d pressure-washed it was that the license plate light was actually on! None of the other lights seem to be working, but apparently my daughter was fooling with the knobs and left it pulled out when I was bleeding the brakes. I don’t currently have the brake lights hooked up, but that will be a fun exercise to see if anything else comes to life.
So, the next tasks in line are:
- Clean out the engine bay. This is going to take several cans of oven cleaner and a long afternoon with the pressure washer.
- Change the oil. It’s black and looks original from 1967.
Hang the doors properly.Both of the striker mechanisms need to be pulled off, disassembled, lubricated, and replaced.- Clean out the interior. It’s dirty and needs a good hose-down.
- Pull the cabtop off and pressure-wash the inside. It’s got a 2″ layer of dirt on the bottom edge and I’d like to blast all that off to see what condition the metal is in.
- Pull the driver’s side gas tank out. The passenger side has two big rust holes on each side; maybe the driver’s side will be in better shape. Oh, wait, was that a pig flying by my window?
- Install a new mechanical fuel pump. The original is soaking in spare gas to see if I can get the diaphragm to come alive again, but I don’t hold out much hope. And all of the extra vacuum lines on that unit are just annoying.
Total costs to date:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1966 Scout 800 | $500 |
| Lunch for the recovery crew | $85.00 |
| Curved points | $7.00 |
| Battery cable | $33.37 |
| Carb Rebuild kit, fuel pump | $46.30 |
| Spare plugs, wires, used starter, coil, fluids | $0 |
| Soft brake lines, two wheel cylinders | $68.47 |
| Antifreeze concentrate, 2 brass brake line couplers | $31.77 |
| Total | $771.91 |
Video Update: 3.13
Here’s the latest video in the Travelall series, covering my attempts to get her running again, involving an afternoon pouring gas into and out of buckets, multiple test runs, carb tuning, and lots of fuel system plumbing. But: it’s on the road again.
On deck for this weekend:
- Tune the Travelall. She’s running, but could be running much better. This video covers how to adjust a Holley carb with a vacuum gauge and tach, which is exactly what I need to do next.
- Wire-wheel the 800 tank & prep for TankWeld. This is all dependent on H-F actually having some wire wheels, which they’ve been out of for the last two months.
- Pull the brakes off the 800 and prep for replacement. I’ve got a set of wheel cylinders and soft lines on their way from RockAuto, and I have a new kit full of threaded brake connectors in hand; with this stuff I should be able to rebuild the front brakes, including bending new hard lines.
- Finish cleaning the frame on the Travelall. Now that she sits a full 2-3″ higher off the ground, it’s easier to get underneath and needle-scale the parts of the frame that I missed the first time around.
- Paint the frame.
- Install the floor in the Travelall. I’d love to put this in for the last time, now that I know I’m going to keep the axle the way it currently is for the time being.
Total costs to date:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1966 Scout 800 | $500 |
| Lunch for the recovery crew | $85.00 |
| Curved points | $7.00 |
| Battery cable | $33.37 |
| Carb Rebuild kit, fuel pump | $46.30 |
| Spare plugs, wires, used starter, coil, fluids | $0 |
| Soft brake lines, two wheel cylinders | $68.47 |
| Total | $740.14 |
Thankful
I took the Scout out for her first long-distance drive of the year last night. The evening was warm so I had the sides of the soft top buttoned up and let the wind blow out the dust. She drove straight and true, the brakes felt great, and once I shook the cobwebs out, she purred like a kitten.
A Weekend of Progress
I’ve had the Travelall off the road for about three solid months now, busy with the spring pack swaps while waiting out the snow. In that time I wasn’t starting her up that often, and with the engine surgery on the 800 taking up a lot of time through the last two months, it’s been on the back burner. However, after getting the springs installed I was keen on taking her out for a test spin to see how things felt. The problem was, I couldn’t get her running long enough to get out of the driveway. She started easily, as she always did, but as soon as I got on the gas, the truck died. I could keep her running for short stints but any attempt to get underway stalled out the engine.
So I went down the rabbit hole of pulling the carb and cleaning it out, figuring it had gummed up over the holiday. Re-installing it, I found I was having the same issues, so I started draining the tank after finding a lot of garbage in the fuel filter. As I got down to the bottom of the tank, I found a whole bunch of water—maybe a half a pint worth. That would certainly explain the issues with stalling. I also found some small plant matter in the gas as I used an old pillowcase to filter it into a 5-gallon bucket. I poured the gas off the water and put the contaminated liquid in another container to turn in at the county landfill.
Another test run showed that there was still an issue with the carb, so I pulled the bowl and metering block off the front and broke them down to find the needle was clogged with more of that plant matter. Once I got the engine buttoned back up, a new fuel filter installed, and the bowl filled, the truck ran better—but was still not at 100%. I fooled with the idle mixture screw, the metering screws, and the timing, and got it running well enough to take a solid spin around the block, but she needs some more tuning to be in good shape: my messing with the timing has the engine dieseling on shutdown. And I need to figure out how to secure the fuel tank from water intrusion. My guess is that the used fuel cap I have is not sealing and rainwater is seeping down into the tank.
The takeaway from the test drive is: She feels good! The springs definitely add some spring to the suspension. All my futzing with the axles didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the alignment, because she drove pretty straight and true. One other thing I wanted to do was find out what the axle ratio is once and for all, so I jacked up the rear, marked the driveshaft and tire, and spun the tire one revolution while watching the driveshaft. It came out to 3.73, which is different than the 4.10 gears on the lineset ticket.
Finally, I drilled a small hole in the V3 cupholder and installed a rubber grommet I found at ACE Hardware, which keeps the metal drink stay from clanging on the transmission tunnel cover. Problem solved. The only thing left is to draw out some felt or rubber wings to attach to the underside of the cup cutouts to keep drink containers from rattling around.
While I had it out, I stopped and took a comparison picture of the spring packs before and after:
Meanwhile, I’m making slow progress on the 800. During the week I pulled the master cylinder off the truck, brought it downstairs to the vise and let the piston soak in penetrant for two days. Then it only took a couple of taps on a 14mm socket with a hammer to push the piston down and free up the system. I cleaned up the bowl, wire-wheeled the linkage, and put it back in the truck.
Then I pulled the wheel off the driver’s front side and spent time hitting the fittings with heat and penetrant—to no success. So I destroyed the soft line in an attempt to remove it, freed up the distribution block (which is basically just a 5-way brass block, super scientific) and reviewed the hardware. The pads are wasted: the front has about 1/32″ of material while the rear is down to solid metal, which means the rotors are scored pretty good. However the cylinders and other hardware looks fine, so I’m going to get the front brakes working good enough to drive around the house, and then I’ll worry about spending money on fixing things.
Putting the Travelall fuel regulator on the boat tank hose, I let the fuel pump run and found that it wasn’t flooding the bowl anymore. But I wanted to see how the mechanical pump looked, so I pulled that off. It was, like the rest of the truck, encrusted in grease and mud, but after a bath in oven cleaner, it came out looking shiny and new. It’s an Airtex 6857, which isn’t made anymore—which makes sense, as it features two vacuum outlets, presumably for windshield wipers. It’s also nothing like any of the other pumps I’ve got, so the next step is going to be soaking it in gas to see if I can free up the diaphragms and re-awaken it.