I’ve got a pile of T-shirts drying in the basement waiting for a turn with the heat gun. We should have about fifteen guys and six trucks gathering to meet up, talk, and have some barbecue on Sunday morning. I’m very much looking forward to it.
Category: Friends
Gathering.
A couple of weeks ago, I started thinking about a Land Rover meetup I went to with my neighbor, who (at that time) owned a Defender 90. We met at a barbecue restaurant in Columbia, parked our trucks in a corner of the lot, and spent the next two hours shooting the shit. It was friendly, informal, and fun (I was Scoutless at the time), and I thought it might be fun to gather the IH guys I’ve met in the area for the same kind of day.
I sent out a big email to everyone I could think of, and within two weeks’ time I’ve got fifteen people committed with five trucks (many are immobile due to ongoing restoration efforts) and possibly more. The cool thing is that there are people I’ve met through the weblog and parts gathering who don’t know or haven’t met the other guys, so it’ll be good to get everyone together in one place. I also suggested doing an informal swap meet while we’re together, and hopefully there will be some horsetrading happening too.
Scout II Dana 44 Rear Disc Brake Conversion Kit
Mike C. sent me a link to this Scout II Dana 44 Rear Disc Brake Conversion Kit, which is several hundred dollars less than I’ve seen in other places. This is on the list of things I’d like to do to Peer Pressure when money isn’t so tight.
Update: looks like the original vendor is gone. I’d go with a couple of the Light Line vendors instead–both of whom have been active in the IH community for years:
Back Country Binders – $600
D&C Extreme – ~$550
D&C even has an instructional video, which is excellent.
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Online Friends
Our friend Mike, out in Colorado, put together a site for his Scout project. He’s a lot deeper into his project than I am into mine (by that I mean total restoration) and he’s got a ton of great pictures documenting how he’s doing things. A recent post on his steering column rebuild has me dreaming of a turn signal that cancels correctly…
In other news, one of the smaller things I picked up on Sunday was an incomplete set of rollbar pads. Due to their age and exposure to the elements, the zippers on both downtubes were frozen stiff, but the crossbar and rear arm pads came off with a little coaxing. The zippers are all pretty rough and some are missing teeth, but for $10 I figure I can have new zippers installed and buy some crash-rated foam to replace what they came with.
Last night I used an old trick for fixing the zippers: I rubbed them liberally with candle wax until I could get all three to catch and zip. I think I’m going to have Jesse cut the other two off for me and set them aside, so that I can have a full set to work with.
New Travel Top, New Friends
This morning I met up with Brian H. and made a run down into Annapolis to pick up a Traveltop. I was a bit hung over, but Peer Pressure fired right up and made the trip easy. After meeting the seller at his house, we wound up talking to him for a good hour and a half before we started turning wrenches. It turns out he’s been buying and parting out trucks for the past couple of years, and he wants to thin his collection out a little.
This top is in really good shape. It’s baby blue with a roof rack, and apart from some minor rust issues under the driver’s window and leaks where the chrome strips sit on the top, it’s clean. The liftgate is in fantastic shape, the handle works perfectly, and the glass is all good. I’m going to pull the sliders out of my spare top and replace these as well as the seals, and maybe weld up a lot of the holes before painting it white.
He threw in a set of Kayline bows he had laying around, and I picked up a spare windshield with a tiny crack in the side as well. We made sure to invite him up to the next wrenching day in the springtime, and hopefully we can get a couple of other locals to meet up when the weather gets warmer.
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Thoughts on Paint.
Colorado Mike has been feeding me steady updates on his resto project via text. The other day he asked me for paint advice, and I sent him my collection of IH paint codes for the entire Scout II run. He’s leaning towards Lexington Blue, a bright shade offered in 1979. It got me thinking about the distant future, when I can strip Peer Pressure down to the metal, POR-15 everything, and paint it in a more pleasing color. Originally I wanted a shade of English green, but Mr. Scout has that one covered. My second choice is a color from the Scout in a movie called “Fools Rush In”. Based on the grille pattern, it’s a ’75 or a ’76, which could only make the color Glacier Blue (it’s the only light blue offered in the ’74-’77 timespan). Looking at the paint chip, it’s a light, flat blue which looks too powdery at first glance.
It could be the film transfer, the lighting, or wear and tear on the truck, but the blue here looks darker to me.
The other candidate is a shade called Bimini Blue Poly, which is a darker blue with candyflake. I can’t find a good example online, but I’ll keep looking.
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Look What My Cousin Bought!
Mirror Measurement
For Mike, here are some rough measurements for stock rearview mirrors (the round kind) on the driver’s door. These measurements were made on a set of spare Terra doors I have socked away in the garage. The holes we’re looking at are the two farthest apart on the outside–the ones on the inside were made after the truck left the factory.
Drawing a line straight down from the rear edge of the butterfly frame, the front hole is 4″ ahead of the line and the rear hole is 1 3/4″ behind. Drawing another line straight through the middle of the two holes, when I put a tape on the bend at the top of the door, the holes are roughly 2 1/4″ below that point.
For an alternate measurement, I started the tape at the very top of the door above the handle and brought it forward. The front hole is at 32 3/4″ and the rear hole is at 27″.
Another good way to double-check these measurements is to pull the glass out of the door and see where the holes come through on the inside; there’s a welded backing plate on the inside of the door skin that should confirm/narrow my measurements.
Update:
My Scout (a 1976 of unknown pedigree) features mounts that are completely different. It turns out the backing plate is moved back about 3″ and isn’t as wide as the one on my spare doors, so I can’t mount the OEM mirror I have on the shelf without drilling into non-reinforced doorskin. The original holes in the plate I have measure roughly 3″ apart. There’s no lower plate provision for a western-style mount, or filled holes from a previous install.
We Need Some Stinkin’ Badges.
I got a Facebook message from Mike in Colorado the other day, who said he’d found a local junkyard and scored a pile of Scout badges for his resto project. He asked me if I needed anything, and I told him I was looking for a set myself; Peer Pressure was clean-shaven when I got her (minus one IH badge on the driver’s fender). Lo and behold, look what appeared on my doorstep yesterday afternoon:
The real miracle is that ALL of them still have their mounting posts. Getting pot-metal badges off without breaking them is something akin to magic; he was able to keep them all intact. Now I must find a suitable gift to send in return….
Bumper Building, Day 4
It’s about time for an update! And yes, I’m starting this off with another bridge picture:
When last we left off, the welder couldn’t meet up with us, so we got a bunch of welds cleaned up, drilled holes for seatbelt mounts, and other smaller tasks accomplished. This Sunday I made it over the river by 10:15 and we were backing up to his shop by 11.
The first task was to mount up the swingarm. We clamped some plate to the top of the bumper, moved things back and forth and up and down, and finally found the right spot. He fired up the welder and got to work.
Once that was in place, we greased and assembled the swingarm cups and bearings, pressed them in with a socket, and set it onto the spindle. Not bad!
There’s a droop of maybe 1/2″ on the far side of the hinge, and even after torquing the castle nut down just a hair of vertical play in the arm.
I wasn’t concerned about the droop all that much, because the next part was welding a receiver to the other side. After lots of consultation, we decided to cut a flat plate and weld that to the face of the bumper, and then weld a section of angle iron to that to act as the shelf it sits on:
While that was cooling down, I had him weld my seatbelt bungs into the rollbar, the spare tire plate onto the standoff, the bolts for the Hi-Lift to the bumper, and the bolts for the spare.
Then, we pulled the whole bumper off to weld two plates of angle iron in behind the outer bumper mounting holes–one side to the frame and the other to the flat plate across the back of the frame. This should provide support for the weight of the tire and bumper.
Once that was all done, we threw everything into the back of the truck, paid the man, and headed back to Brian’s place. There we drilled out the mounting holes for the bumper, put that back in, mounted the swingarm, and tested the height of the receiver on the tailgate: too high! We had to chop about 1″ off the top of the receiver to clear the tailgate as it came down all the way, but there’s still plenty of backstop left to keep the arm from hitting the back of the truck. The last thing we did was drill a hole for a receiver pin; by then it was 6PM and time for a swim in the river.
When I get home this evening I’ll shoot some pictures of the swingarm open and add them here for reference.
So, next steps are:
- Pull everything back apart and clean up all the welds.
- Bondo up any holes and sand everything smooth.
- Etching primer on everything (POR-15 on the frame welds)
- Some kind of black high-impact paint to finish everything off
- Find a lock solution for the jack
- Pick up some lug nuts for the spare
- Find some kind of mounting solution for the license plate
- Run wiring to the license plate for lighting
- Mount it all back up and go!
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