Because I am insane, I put three layers of work clothes on and ventured out into 12˚ weather (with the wind chill, feels like 1˚) to see if I could make some magic happen on the 800. The first thing to do was to chip the ice/snow melt away from the garage doors, put the Scout into 4WD and pull it out on top of the crust to warm up. With the garage clear, I cleaned off and sanded the points from the 800 and re-installed them in the engine. Pulling the battery out of the Travelall, I removed the spark plugs and bumped it over to blow out all of the remaining ATF from the cylinders. With that done, it was time to yank the distributor and pre-oil the engine.
Looking high and low through all of my bins, I could not find the fancy pre-oiling tool I inherited from somewhere, even though it was clearly noted in my spreadsheet. So I found a steel bar in my stock, cut it down to size, and welded a bolt to the end to make my own tool. With some careful filing at the end I had a workable tool. I marked the distributor location and pulled it out carefully, then put the tool in the bore and ran it for about three minutes. I’d pulled the valve cover off to see if I could see any of the oil making its way to the top of the drivetrain, but I didn’t notice anything.
In the garage, I aimed the space heater at my hands and used a plastic scraper to clean years of mud and oil off the distributor housing, revealing an original IH part number. This is a Prestolite unit, with curved points and female connectors on the cap, and with some brake cleaner and a rag I was able to get it to shine up pretty good.
Stabbing the distributor back in the engine, I re-connected the ignition system and put a spark tester on the #1 wire. At first the starter didn’t want to catch, so I whacked it with a hammer a couple of times to wake it up. After turning it over, I got no spark, so I popped the cap back off the distributor and checked the points with the key in the On position. I did get spark with a screwdriver between the points body and the shaft, but not at the points themselves, which tells me they are toast. A new set of curved points were only $7 on the jungle site, so I’d bought them last week but they won’t be here until Tuesday, so I’m at a standstill. Which is OK, because the battery did not want to crank at this temperature, and my fingers did not want to continue taking direction from my brain. So I buttoned up the 800 and returned the battery to the Travelall. With a little bit of choke she fired up immediately and settled into a good idle, so I let her warm up while I put my tools away. Man, I love that truck; I can’t wait to get the other spring pack installed.
Inside the garage, I had a plan to get my storage bins up and off the floor. Searching for the pre-oiling tool underlined just how annoying it was getting to move crap around just to get into a particular bin. With a handful of 1×3″s I built a frame and sliders on the far side and was able to get six bins stacked from floor to ceiling, cutting their footprint in half. There are still other bins that had to go next to them along with some other miscellaneous parts, but that freed up a huge amount of space at the back of the garage.
And because it’s so damn cold out, I need other projects to work on. So I modified my cupholder design again. I guess I never updated the progress here: In December I’d modified the design to widen the cupholder openings, deleted the vertical support, added two holes for the mounting bolts, and rounded the top edge. When I ordered it I made a mistake and specified 0.12″ thick steel, which turned out to be SUPER-beefy and overkill. And somehow the openings for the cupholders were still the original size. So I modified it again to verify the holes were larger, and redrew the edges a third time to match them better. With that done, I sent it in to have three examples cut and bent out of 0.071″ thick steel; hopefully the third time is the charm, and these will be fit for production.
So for the 800, the next steps will be:
- Swap in the new points
- Swap in new spark plug wires
- Test that the wire lead from the coil to the distributor is functioning (it’s very frayed)
- Turn it over and test for spark.
Here’s the running total on this truck so far:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1966 Scout 800 | $500 |
| Lunch for the recovery crew | $85.00 |
| Curved points | $7.00 |
| Total | $592 |