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.



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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Back in April I had some time to kill during a long freelance project where I was spending a ton of time in Illustrator. Inspired by some vintage car dealer badges I’d seen, I designed one of my own as a flat file in Illustrator, and started looking in to how to build it out as a file that could be read by a 3D printer. While I can’t make complex shapes with this software, I was able to get it 95% of the way there.
Our local library finally reopened this summer but they haven’t re-started their 3D printing service. The only two branches to offer it are a 20 minute drive away north of the city. It’s now set up as a self-serve option, so you have to get certified to use the printer. I set up an appointment to do this on a day Finn was off from school, and the three of us drove up there this morning.
We sat through the quick tutorial, took a test, and were certified within about 20 minutes. While the librarian showed us the system, she asked if we had anything we wanted to print, and I broke out my file. She used that to set things up and we watched it start printing as we finished our course.
At first, it looked really stringy and weird like somebody was laying out thin strands of bubblegum on a flat plate, but as it started stacking up layers, the letterforms solidified to the point where when it finished, it was almost as clear as the file I built. Overall, it took about 40 minutes to print and while that was happening, I took care of work related stuff while the girls read. I’m really very pleased with the outcome here. This looks very close to what I had in my head when I designed it and I think there are only a few tweaks I would make to this piece before printing two more out: one for the Scout and one for Darth.
I pulled the trigger on a SendCutSend order yesterday, after adjusting the template, cutting it out in full scale on some chipboard, and testing my measurements. For some reason I’d gotten one measurement wrong, and I had to adjust the length of the mounting plate, but after adjusting that the whole thing went together perfectly. I’m having this cut out of 16 gauge steel so it should be plenty strong to hold up to any kind of accidents. It should be here in a couple of weeks, and then I can weld the pieces up.
If I was to order ten of these, I could get the costs way down per piece. If I could get ten people interested in buying them, I could possibly make a little money on the deal. I think the biggest issue would be finding a way to attach the unit without drilling into the seat bar. I’ll have to have a think about that one.
Meanwhile, I’ve been putting a list of projects together for 2025, and it’s almost done. One of the things on the list was pretty easy to check, so I looked it over at lunchtime: My brake pedal doesn’t light the brake lights when it’s pressed. It’s a very simple system. There’s a switch at the end of the master cylinder, and when the pedal pressurizes the cylinder, it closes the switch, activating the brake lights. Pulling the wire connector off the cylinder, I used a wire to jump it and verified the brake lights work. So there’s got to be an issue with the master cylinder itself. If I recall correctly, I swapped the old switch onto the new unit, so it might just be a matter of ordering a new switch unit.