Category: Inspiration

When MotorTrend was shut down earlier this year, the management offered first dibs on all of the project cars to each of the hosts. David Freiburger bought the International pickup he resurrected on an episode of Roadkill Garage and cleaned it up for resale.

I would love it if he’d kept this and kept working on it; it’s three years older than Darth Haul and has a straight six engine, but otherwise is a dead ringer: IH red, with 4 speed stick and no frills. $5K is a screaming good deal for this truck.

A Scout vendor sent an email last week featuring a new product offering: a cupholder designed for the Scout II. It’s built from 18 gauge stainless and looks primarily brake-bent with no welds I can see. It attaches to the truck using the bottom two screws on the trans tunnel, which is pretty clever. As a longtime proponent of the Tuffy console with built-in cupholder, I can already see two issues with their design: bent 18 ga. stainless steel is nice but I could see that getting beat up pretty quickly. It’s finished pretty well but I think I’d like to see it finished a bit more. And stainless means you can’t paint it to your liking, which is either a feature or a bug depending on your POV.

The second is that any drink you put in there will be sitting directly on the trans tunnel, which tends to be one of the hottest places on the truck. My Tuffy cupholder suspends drinks about 3″ over the cover but it still cooks a chilled drink fast enough to be warm within 20 minutes. A few years ago I cut and installed a square of insulating foam under my cupholder to try to stave off some of that heat.

Finally, they’re selling theirs for $50. They’ve got the reach, so it makes sense that they can pre-produce something like 50 of them to lower the unit cost and know they’ll probably sell them. If I do my C-series cupholders, I’d probably make 10 and hope I could sell them, and I’d increase the price a little bit. I do think I could assembly-line the construction and speed that process up.

Food for thought, at least.

I started keeping a weblog in the middle of 2001, and it became a habit. I was never into it to monetize the site, I was never cool enough to be one of the kool blog kids (most of whom have faded back into obscurity) and I never pursued a network through the site like a lot of other folks did. But I did enjoy the dopamine hit of writing, editing, and posting stuff, no matter how boring or niche it wound up being; I enjoyed the exercise.

I started this Scout blog in 2009 after I bought Peer Pressure. Mostly it’s a record of the things I’ve accomplished, and I use it to remember how or when I did something. Since I’ve been working on Darth it’s also become a record of how I did something for anyone else dumb enough to buy a truck made by an obscure, deceased company. But some days I write on this site and feel good about keeping track of what I’ve done, and some days I wonder why I’m doing it.

My hits on this site have dropped pretty dramatically in the last year or so. It used to be that this site actually got more traffic than my personal weblog, probably because this is such a niche subject. But that’s slowed way down for reasons I don’t understand. I’ve gone for weeks without any feedback and only a handful of hits, which is kind of a bummer. It’s made me question, once again, why I’m doing this, and whether I should continue.

On Tuesday, I got a call out of the blue from a very old Scout acquaintance from back in the days of Chewbacca, with whom I’d bought and sold parts. He’s looking to fix up his Scout to sell it—he’s not driving it anymore—and wondered if I had a stock radio in my stash. We caught up for a little bit and I told him I’d hit the grapevine to see what I could dig up.

Yesterday I got a couple of comments on the YouTube channel from someone with a similar truck, who said he liked the videos. My view counts there average around 300 or so per video, which is less than peanuts, but much like the weblog, I think I enjoy the process of recording, editing and posting enough to keep doing it, even if it’s mostly for myself.

On the Binder Planet, about an hour later, I got a nice comment in my build thread from another guy who has a similar truck, and whose build thread I’ve referred to repeatedly for some of the projects I’ve been working on. That felt good.

And 30 minutes after that, I got two sales on my Threadless storefront for a couple of Scout shirts. I haven’t advertised them on social media lately, but there’s a pitch at the end of each of the videos for them.

So maybe this is the universe telling me to keep doing what I’m doing. Even if I’m not the size of Mr. Beast, I’m still finding satisfaction in what I’m doing, and other people seem to be, too.