Good news: the Travelall is running again. I did a quick inventory to see how many ignition switches I’ve got, and it turned out I have five. One from the original truck, one from the replacement harness, one from the green truck, one from the Scout 800, and one NIB unit. The switch I was using was the one from the replacement harness, which had worked fine up until this problem. When I pulled it out the other day, the lock barrel was spinning freely inside the switch, which meant that nothing was making a connection inside the switch to send signals to the truck. Last weekend I went over to the 800 in storage, pulled the NIB lock barrel I’d put in that, and brought it back to the bench to swap in the lock barrel I have a key for. Putting it in the truck, it started, but something inside was sticking, keeping the starter grinding, and pulling the key back killed the engine.

So I went through the other switches. I cleaned rust off the connection blades off the Scout 800 switch, scrubbed it with electrical degreaser, and shot it full of WD-40.  The barrel went in perfectly, and the truck fired up and ran without a hitch. This switch is probably the original USA-made unit from 1967, was sitting out in a field for 15+ years, and worked flawlessly. The new unit I bought seems to be faulty, which tracks with a lot of comments I’ve been hearing about the quality of new parts lately.

Out on the road, the truck ran fine—she was upset because she hadn’t been run up in two weeks, so I had to warm her up—but once we were moving she was fine. I’m still getting a ferocious wobble at about 55mph, which I haven’t tracked down yet. I put a camera on the passenger rear tire, which looked pretty steady; I’m going to put cameras on the other three tires this weekend to see if I can pin down the source.

This weekend I’m going to pull the rear wheel off the Scout and see if I can sort out the evap/emissions gear in the rear passenger fender; I’d pulled it all out when we swapped the poly tank in 15 years ago like a dummy, but looking it over on the bench and comparing to the service manual, it’s clear some yee-haw got in there and butchered the original connections. I bought some new fittings and fuel hose from ACE last weekend, and I’m going to attempt to re-install the system the way the manual specifies. I’m actually considering dropping the tank completely to re-install the sender gasket; we’ll see how ambitious I feel tomorrow.

I’m also going to shoot the entire steering box/pump with oven cleaner to degrease the entire unit so that I can figure out where it’s leaking from—and pin down my next steps for that issue. New boxes are $600 before shipping, so if it’s something simpler than that, I’d be very happy. But I doubt it. Thankfully I’ve got a spare in the garage for the core charge.