Today I spent a little time looking over the doors I bought last weekend. I stuffed them right inside the front door of the garage when I got home last weekend, so they were in the way of a lot of things. We had to remove the passenger door without the hinges due to clearance […]
One of the challenges and quirks of driving 50-year-old vehicle is that we are slaves to the fickle black magic of carburetion. Many carburetors before the 1970’s were simple devices with few moving parts, but as emissions and fuel economy standards were implemented by the government, engineers added all kinds of hoses and vacuum lines […]
I had an hour or two this weekend to fool with the Scout, and decided to pull the soft top off and drop the Traveltop on the rails. This is the first time it’s been on in two years, as I lost all of last fall to chemotherapy. As a result I was a little […]
Wow, I actually knocked a lot of stuff off the 2018 to-do list. Tires, Hagerty insurance, and Hydroboost are all some big accomplishments compared to years past. I’m feeling pretty good about everything, and Peer Pressure is running strong. Still, there’s more that can be done: Buy a new aluminum radiator and install it. Climbing […]
Since May of 2009, I’ve put 9,436 miles on the Scout, according to the odometer. This is not accurate because the ratio gear on the odometer hasn’t been adjusted for larger tires (so, for example, 50mph indicated = 63mph). Doing a little back of the envelope math for the actual ratio (6 : 7.7) tells […]
I got the accelerator cable in on Friday, and after breakfast on Saturday morning I went outside to put it in. It’s fairly straightforward and went in without too much hassle, once I realized the loop molded into the cable wasn’t supposed to hook over the top of the bracket, but used to screw in […]
I don’t have any money to be spending on the Scout right now, but one of the things on the to-do list is to rebuild a spare carburetor. I have two spares, one of which is of uncertain provenance and the other a direct pull from a Scout. Given that Carter made a million modifications […]
Peer Pressure is back on the road and running like a top. After a long three weeks at the mechanic, the carburetor problem was finally solved; the reason for the leakage was a set of tiny O-rings which were actually supposed to be X-rings. Once he’d torn it down for the fifth time and put […]
I got word from my mechanic yesterday that the carb went back together well, except for one small hitch: the gasket they sent in the rebuild kit (Walker 15821A) is too thick for this application. Apparently I have a heated choke (as opposed to manual or electric) which means the choke is actuated by the […]
Today was a Scout day, even if I don’t have my Scout back yet. My mechanic got back to me on Friday and asked for a little more time to work on her, which means Monday or Tuesday. The fact that I missed a week of almost perfect convertible weather has me bummed, but the […]