There’s a ton to write about but I haven’t had the time yet. While you wait, here’s a cool picture:
My father-in-law said he knew Duke Cunningham and said he was a self-centered prick. Fuck that guy. Great photo, though.
(via)
Category: Inspiration
Bill’s House of Internationals
Sunday morning update: the Danscout is out of the backyard and safely tucked in the garage! I spent the bulk of yesterday replacing the wheel cylinders, soft lines, and cleaning out the roached pads and drums, capping off the rear brakes, and bleeding the system. I had to spend more time than I wanted futzing with one of the brake cylinders for a while. The threads hadn’t been cut deep enough to make a solid connection with the flare, so I had to double-flare it to make it thicker, and that finally worked. After capping off the rears, I had my daughter help me bleed it out enough to engage the fronts, which was all I needed to move it around the house without fear of driving through the neighbors’ fence. (That drunk fence in the background of my pictures is theirs, but whoever installed it only poured the footers about 4″ deep, so they’ve heaved over the years and come out. I’ve straightened it twice with the Scout and some chains but finally gave up.)
Then I mixed up some antifreeze and topped off the radiator, glad to see it held liquid and didn’t pee out all over everything. After moving all of my tools out of the way, I fired it up and eased it into gear. I think the clutch is pretty well roached, because it only engages at the very end of the pedal throw, but it does engage. I got it around the house, down onto the driveway, and backed it down to the front of the garage for a quick pressure-wash. Most of the dirt, mold, and at least 1/4 of the paint came off pretty easily. I still can’t tell what color this thing was originally, but I believe it was Light Yellow, and then someone hand-brushed another similar coat of yellow over that. The pressure wash blew a lot of the yellow off to reveal gray primer (or perhaps Aspen Green Metallic?) underneath.
With the dirt on the outside cleaned off, I let it dry out and then backed it into the garage. The plan now is to store Peer Pressure in my friend Brian’s spare garage bay for a while as I get the 800 sorted, and swap the Travelall in and out of there to keep both trucks lubricated and running. I’m going to rob the battery from PP to run the 800 for now with the intention of working on it while spending as little as possible.
Before closing up for the night I cut some scrap 14 ga. steel down and made a fuel pump blockoff plate after noticing I’d puked a bunch of oil out of the open hole. This coming week I’m going to drain the remaining oil out and send some away to Blackstone for analysis—I’m curious to see what they can tell me about the health of this engine. I will say that it’s strong and happy to idle, in spite of the fact that I’ve done absolutely no adjustments to the carb or distributor since re-stabbing it. One thing that does need adjustment is the amount of fuel pressure; I’ve got it closed down to 2psi through the regulator, but every time I got on the gas it felt like it was draining the bowl and I’d have to wait until it refilled to be able to get the RPMs up again.
One other funny thing I noticed after I’d pressure-washed it was that the license plate light was actually on! None of the other lights seem to be working, but apparently my daughter was fooling with the knobs and left it pulled out when I was bleeding the brakes. I don’t currently have the brake lights hooked up, but that will be a fun exercise to see if anything else comes to life.
So, the next tasks in line are:
- Clean out the engine bay. This is going to take several cans of oven cleaner and a long afternoon with the pressure washer.
- Change the oil. It’s black and looks original from 1967.
Hang the doors properly.Both of the striker mechanisms need to be pulled off, disassembled, lubricated, and replaced.- Clean out the interior. It’s dirty and needs a good hose-down.
- Pull the cabtop off and pressure-wash the inside. It’s got a 2″ layer of dirt on the bottom edge and I’d like to blast all that off to see what condition the metal is in.
- Pull the driver’s side gas tank out. The passenger side has two big rust holes on each side; maybe the driver’s side will be in better shape. Oh, wait, was that a pig flying by my window?
- Install a new mechanical fuel pump. The original is soaking in spare gas to see if I can get the diaphragm to come alive again, but I don’t hold out much hope. And all of the extra vacuum lines on that unit are just annoying.
Total costs to date:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1966 Scout 800 | $500 |
| Lunch for the recovery crew | $85.00 |
| Curved points | $7.00 |
| Battery cable | $33.37 |
| Carb Rebuild kit, fuel pump | $46.30 |
| Spare plugs, wires, used starter, coil, fluids | $0 |
| Soft brake lines, two wheel cylinders | $68.47 |
| Antifreeze concentrate, 2 brass brake line couplers | $31.77 |
| Total | $771.91 |
Fifteen Seconds
I was happy to see my humble three-colored Scout in one of the photos from Scout Motors’ recap of the event; strangely there’s a better shot of her in the social media post.
View this post on Instagram
(I’m in the back of the John Glancy slide, between the shiny new prototypes).
Back Home Safe
We rolled in after a 9-hour drive; I’ll just drop a few photos here right now and preview the recap by saying it was amazing.
Puddin’s Steering Column
The guy who inspired me to build the seat lockbox for Darth just did another video where he swapped in an Ididit steering column to his ’68. His setup was a bit more complicated because his truck is a column shift and he swapped a Crown Vic subframe/GM powertrain, among other things, but he’s a lot more experienced with fabrication than I am.
Saturday Drive
The Roadkill Garage International
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.
Inspiration and Education
I’ve found a new ASMR mechanic fix-it YouTube channel that does away with a lot of the stuff that annoys me about most of the other channels out there. Like podcasts, the channels I follow are graded by the content, the presentation, and narration. The last one can be a make or break for me: if the narrator is annoying or has a terrible voice, I’m usually out. There’s a ton of content out there that fit into my areas of interest but which I can’t stand due to failures in the categories above.
Simon Fordman hosts a channel where all he does is fix cars. There’s no audio narration, which demands close attention because he puts it in the closed captioning—so if you want to follow along you’ve got to keep a close eye on things. Watching his latest video, he fixes a formerly abandoned AMC Javelin with starting, idling and brake issues, and just by watching I realized there are three things I need to investigate on Darth Haul: the choppy idle could be a fuel issue or it could be that the points are corroded. He does a simple test at idle to figure out which plugs aren’t firing, checks the gap on the points, and adjusts the timing at the distributor to smooth the engine out.
The car cover I’ve been using tends to trap moisture inside when it’s on the truck. I’ve noticed dampness in the engine bay immediately after removing it, and I’ll bet that’s had some effect on the electronics under the hood. So I’ve got a game plan for my next workday:
- Replace the fuel filter and see if that solves the delivery issue.
- Pull the plugs one by one to see which cylinders aren’t firing.
- Adjust the gap in the points to (hopefully) solve that issue. If not, try another compression test.
- Adjust the timing again to smooth out the idle.
Posted on | | Leave a Comment on Inspiration and Education | Posted in Helpful Info, Inspiration, Travelall
#goals
Judging the Competition
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.