The Scout is sitting inside a garage down outside of Annapolis as terrible thunderstorms rumble overhead, waiting on a used exhaust heat riser to ship from Ohio. An exhaust heat riser is a valve that stays closed on startup and heats the manifold quickly, which is supposed to lower emissions. My truck, being a 1979 model, came with all of the emissions garbage they could think of that year to try and appease the EPA for an engine designed in the late 1950’s; there are more hoses on that engine than a garden supply store. Anyway, over time, the valve seizes up and stays closed, which is what it sounds like mine has done. This part isn’t regularly made for Scouts anymore, so Super Scout Specialists is sending us a used unit and we’ll throw that in to see if the leak disappears. I’m going to have my mechanic save the old one so I can disassemble it and weld the holes for the shaft closed: I can then use it for a replacement when this valve dies.
Because I am a dipshit and I’ve had Travelall on the brain almost exclusively lately, I completely forgot about two other Scout projects that have been sitting quietly in a box in the basement since the end of winter. I’m in a bit of a holding pattern on the Travelall until I get some stuff organized, so I thought I’d look through the box and get things sorted out.
- I bought new wing window rubber for the Scout very soon after they started producing it. Both wing windows on Peer Pressure feature crumbling, UV-blasted rubber. Both of the mounts on each window are broken at the pivot spring underneath, which basically means the window opens and flops around in the slipstream. And the passenger wing latch fell off, so it doesn’t stay closed. In my parts stash I have a grand total of seven spare wing windows: three loose units I’ve collected from parts trucks, and four that were installed in the four spare doors I’ve got. Among all of these spares, I have a total of two that aren’t busted to shit. So I pulled a good left and right unit out of the parts doors and gave them a once-over. Both are OK except that the left unit doesn’t have a latch—but I’ve got spares of those.The lower left brace on the right unit was loose: the spot welds were giving way, so I busted out the MIG and tacked it back into place with little trouble. I brought them down to the basement workbench to be refurbished during rainy weekends in front of a football game.
- I’d completely forgotten that I also bought a new battery pan for the Scout to replace what’s left of the factory pan in there now. It’s a beefy chunk of bare metal and needs a scuff, a coat of etching primer, and several coats of strong black paint (and maybe a layer of undercoating) before I put in in the truck. It’s got three bolts welded underneath to mount to the inner fender—I’ll have to check my spare fender a little more closely to see if this will be just a simple task of cutting the old one out and bolting the new one in (the two holes on the right side of the shelf area below).But once the truck is back I can install that, and set up a proper battery hold down situation; the battery is currently held in place with a tired bungee cord. Because that’s how I roll.
