Category: Junkyards

Pittsburgh Road Trip

Sunday morning broke cold but sunny, and I hit the road at 7AM with the car already loaded. I had a 3.5 hr. drive out to the other side of Pittsburgh in front of me, but my podcast app was loaded and I was headed away from the sunrise—which was good, because my sunglasses are AWOL. The drive was unremarkable other than beautiful foliage blooming throughout southern Pennsylvania, and I reached Pittsburgh by 11:30 with one stop for expensive gas. The yard was on a hill above the river, and I found two Internationals among many large tractor trailers in a commercial yard. I texted the owner and got to work on the column.

Because the truck was already pretty well picked over I had free access to the stuff I needed: there were only two bolts under the dash to free up the column there, but the three bolts on the steering box were rusted pretty good and the nuts were inaccessible due to a gusset built into the frame. I’d thought ahead and brought my generator, though, and after about 10 minutes with a corded cutoff wheel I trimmed off the bolt heads and pried the box off the frame with a bitch bar. Now, I had to figure out how to get the column out—and I’d forgotten to bring my steering wheel puller. Thankfully, Joey, the guy selling the truck, had one in his shop down the street, and ran me down to pick it up. We paused to look over a beautiful C-series tow truck he’s finishing up, and then he brought me back up to the yard.

I had the wheel off in 5 minutes and then had to puzzle out how to remove the whole unit. The collar in the cab wouldn’t fit through the hole in the firewall (I had this issue with the green truck) nor would the steering box. I did notice the collar moving as I was tugging on it from inside the cab and realized it wasn’t connected to the box anymore—then saw that if I pulled on the steering box from the front, the rod inside slid out of the outer casing and suddenly I was holding those two elements in my hands. The outer tube came out through the cab with a little convincing, and I put the two sections back together on the tailgate of the Honda.

Then I went through the rest of the truck and pulled some other parts off: The windshield wiper motor, the instrument cluster, the radio blockoff plate, and a slightly banged up ’63-’64 headlight trim ring. Inside the cab someone had stacked some extra parts, and I fished out some more good stuff: two uncut metal door cards, a heater motor (the heater in this truck was melted), an ashtray, a marker light assembly, a window crank unit, two sun visors in good shape, and an emergency brake assembly. I did leave a bunch of larger stuff behind—two D-series windshields, a rear pickup window, an instrument cluster in worse shape, and a bunch of other stuff.

After loading up and paying Joey I hit the road at about 4PM and made it home by 8 after stopping for some dinner. The steering column doesn’t look too different from the unit I pulled out of the green truck, save the fact that it’s attached to a power steering box, so I’ll have two basic units to practice on before I do anything with the one in Darth.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Pittsburgh Road Trip  |  Posted in Junkyards, Purchasing, Trip Logs

Sunday Excursion

I’ve got a line on a manual steering column, which is excellent news, and the price is right. But excellent news is usually accompanied by a catch, and this is no different. The catch here is that the parts truck in question is outside of Pittsburgh, which is about a 4-hour drive away from here. It looks like it’s perfect for my requirements; the truck is in the open, in a clean yard, and the hood is already gone so there’s nothing in the way. I’d be pulling the entire column from the wheel all the way down to the box; I’ll just unbolt the box and maybe cut the pitman arm, or bring a fork and pound out the link. Then it’s just removing 4 bolts under the dashboard, disconnecting some wiring, and out it should come. Easy, right?

As usual though, I’m going to bring the entire recovery kit, and this time I might even bring my generator and a corded cutoff wheel, just in case. It’s going to be a long day and I don’t want to be out there forever.

Making this trip a little sweeter is a pile of leftover parts another semi-local Travelall guy offered me after restomodding his truck. He’s outside of Frederick, which is right on the way, and he has a full set of gauges, seatbelts, and a couple of master cylinders. The seatbelts are an excellent find, as the mounting brackets on some of mine are pretty roached, and the gauges may come in handy, although I’ve got three full sets already. But I can always bring stuff to Nats and sell it.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Sunday Excursion  |  Posted in Junkyards, Purchasing

Archaeological Dig

My sister and I revisited the yard up in New York near her house where I pulled the nose off the green pickup last fall. I’d called ahead to ask the owner if he had a manual steering column for a manual-shift truck, and he said he didn’t, but the yard is too cool not to go back to, and I only saw a third of it the last time I was there, so I made plans to return. We were lucky to get a warm, overcast day amidst a week of snow and rain, so we didn’t have to bundle up completely, but we wore muck boots because we knew it would be wet.

After talking with him a bit at the gate, we grabbed some tools and headed into the yard. This time we were unaccompanied so we could walk at our own pace. As I mentioned the first time I went, he’s got a ton of Studebaker rolling stock back there—Commanders and Hawks and Champions and Larks and even a square-light Avanti—but he’s probably got the largest collection of Studebaker trucks on the east coast.

We walked to the outside edges of his collection this time, taking advantage of the fact that nothing had started growing. The amount and selection of vehicles back there is pretty amazing. He’s got prewar Packards next to 60’s sedans, a couple of toothy porthole Buicks, hulking Hudsons… the list goes on.

I did find the steering column I wanted in an otherwise untouched ’62 pickup that was missing its floorboards and asked him about it, but he said he wanted to keep the truck whole. I also looked at the pickup I’d done surgery on last time and considered pulling the tailgate but ultimately passed on it, opting to leave with just the other taillight bucket which was in excellent shape.

I could have spent days in that yard, and I will go back the next time I’m up here. For now, I’ve got about an hour of footage to go through for the next video. Meanwhile, there’s a guy parting out a pickup outside of Pittsburgh with the exact column I need, so I’ve got to organize a trip out that way to pull it depending on his price.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Archaeological Dig  |  Posted in Junkyards

Unfulfilled

Saturday I had the afternoon to fiddle with the truck, so I focused on getting the clutch unstuck. First I stopped at Hobo Freight to pick up some long pry tools to separate the clutch plate from the flywheel. Later I climbed under the truck and tried to get the tools where they needed to be, but found that the angle required was too great—the bellhousing made it impossible to get the tools I had in the proper position.

The next possibility is to run the engine to temperature and heat soak the clutch, so I focused on getting her started. While I was able to get her to idle last weekend I couldn’t get her to catch at all with gas in the bowl.

Sunday morning I had a little time before a junkyard run to pull the plugs on Darth. All of them except #5 and 7 on the driver’s side were pretty fouled with gas and oil, so I cleaned them off and put them back in. I also checked the other wires for corrosion and re-routed them all above the water pump neck. With that done, I connected the boat tank behind the filter, powered the electric pump and tried cranking the truck over, but still couldn’t get it to catch. At this point I’m thinking the carburetor needs to be pulled off and cleaned out again, because I can get fuel to the bowl and I know I’m getting spark to the plugs.

At 11, Bennett pulled up to the house in his Scout. We transferred tools and drove Peer Pressure to a junkyard on the eastern side of Baltimore to pick parts off a Chrysler Crossfire they’ve had in their yard for two weeks. He’d already been over there once to get some stuff but wanted to return for some other things before it got scrapped. His Crossfire is almost 20 years old now and a lot of small things are breaking, so he had a long list of plastic parts and other fasteners to grab. The two big things on his list were an intact windshield and the corner of the rocker panel behind the driver side door. The car had been picked over pretty well, so we got what we could and he focused on cutting the rocker out with a Sawzall while I tried to cut away the glue around the windshield. He was stymied by a thick section of structural metal under the outer skin and a dying set of batteries, and I was stopped by rock-hard glue that prevented any blade I had from cutting.

The junkyard on this side of town has always been an interesting place to experience the wide spectrum of humanity; all the self-service yards around here have the same grubby, slightly institutional feel of a prison, but this one is the grubbiest. It always feels like one is visiting a shady uncle doing time for a meth bust. While we were pulling parts we had two different men stop by and ask to borrow our impact driver; both reeked of pot and could barely stand, let alone talk. I demurred, assuming I would never see my tool again—figuring the chances were equal they would either steal it or wander off, forget where they were, and fall asleep in one of the cars.

We then found a 2009 Nissan Versa and proceeded to demolish the plastic dashboard to expose the electric steering unit underneath. The one I’d disassembled last year had already been partially deconstructed due to a head-on collision, but this one was intact so we had to get physical with the plastics and fasteners. Once we’d cut away half the dashboard and wrapped it up over the passenger side, the guts were easier to reach and we got the unit out in one piece. Then we had to prop the column up over the wheelbarrow and remove the airbag, steering wheel, and control stalks so that he wouldn’t be charged for the extra elements. With those safely collected, I made a brief stop at a CR-V to pull the driver’s sunvisor and then we headed for home.

So there wasn’t much forward progress with the truck, which has me feeling blue. But here’s a recap video from the last two weeks:

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Unfulfilled  |  Posted in Friends, Junkyards, Travelall, Video

Thanksgiving Picking

Up in New York State to visit my family this Thanksgiving weekend, I reconnected with a guy near my sister’s house who has a lot full of antique iron in some fields off a back road. He’d advertised a Travelette late last year which I was interested in picking over but when the green truck landed in my lap, my plans changed. In February he said he also had a ’62 Travelall panel van in rough shape (he sent me a few pictures) so I figured I’d take a few hours and finally go check it out (the Travelette has since been purchased). I packed my standard recovery kit: tools, torch, PBblaster, impact gun, pry bars, and cold weather gear. I also bought a cordless angle grinder based on previous experiences, but left it in the box in case I didn’t need it.

If you didn’t know where to look for his yard you’d never find it, but what a collection he’s got. He’s heavy into Studebaker, Willys, and old Chevrolet, but there are all different makes sprinkled in. After carefully edging past an ancient Hudson, we cut some brush back and crawled through a hole in the fence to reach the truck.

It was beached next to a dually 50’s Chevrolet truck and a bathtub Nash that was sinking backwards into the dirt. The Travelall was well-used and picked over pretty good, so there wasn’t much to see there; I grabbed marker lights, the rear barn door handle (now I can soak this, disassemble it, and rekey it for the red truck) and the ’62 grille and headlight surrounds, which are in very good shape. The steering column was completely gone as was the manual box, so that was a bust.

I walked through the section I was in and came upon a ’68 pickup with a cap in very good shape. Both doors were inaccessible so I couldn’t get into the cab, and lifting the hood revealed column-shift manual steering, so I didn’t go for that. But the sheet metal on the front clip was in miraculously good shape. Both turn signal buckets were solid and the metal behind them was too, so I talked with the owner and made a deal on the entire nose. He agreed to let me cut it out as opposed to trying to remove all the fasteners (both of the fenders were garbage in the usual C-series way).

So I unfastened what I could, pulled the radiator and drained it for him, and cut both sides out as carefully as possible. I found that my normal-sized 20V batteries weren’t big enough to keep the grinder going for long, so I’ll have to get a pair of larger ones when these are worn out.

After about an hour I had the sheet metal free from the truck but had to cut the bottom mount bolt out to get it around a big homemade bumper. This took several trips back and forth to the garage, where he had my charger on a long extension cord. Then I had to jimmy the clip backwards to scoot it under the top lip of the same bumper. With that out, and a set of perfect taillight buckets, I hauled my finds back to the car and gave him my cash.

He then took me on a quick tour of the collection, where he’s got even more stuff across the street in another field, including a beautiful old cabover IH tractor, several C-series pickups, and a B-series Travelall that used to be a civil defense vehicle. There were rows and rows of Studebakers, a beautiful porthole Buick, Packards and Nashes and a Morris Minor minus its convertible top. The collection went on forever. These kinds of yards are all but extinct up here in salt country, so being able to spend at least five hours there on a snowy Friday was a lot of fun.

As for my new parts, the top of this nose is in rough shape, but I should be able to graft the bottom on to my existing sheet metal. The area around the turn signals on my truck is the worst rust besides the cowl vents I repaired last summer, so having some good metal to work with was worth the effort. I’ve got several taillight lenses, a perfect bucket, and several front lenses. And the ’62 grille and matching dual-light surrounds. All in all, not a bad haul.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Thanksgiving Picking  |  Posted in Junkyards, Purchasing

Weekend Recap, 11.24

I spent Saturday down at Bob’s with my brother in law, working to get the Chrysler back in the garage. The engineering problem I faced was how to push a 4,300 lb. car back up a slight incline into the garage, while also moving it laterally by about ten feet. The solution I came up with involved a hammer drill, several concrete bits, lag bolts and barrels, and a cheap Harbor Freight winch with a remote.

After loading up on the supplies, Glen and I opened up the shiny new garage door and set up for the installation. I measured out two holes for the baseplate and had him start drilling while I assembled the winch. After a couple of tries with different bits and an adjustment in hardware which required a return trip to Lowe’s and a stopoff for tacos.

When we got back, the new bits we bought made relatively short work of 45-year-old concrete, and I was able to anchor the winch into the floor. I pulled the battery from the Chrysler and used that for power (it’s been on a tender since I bought it) and we played out the line to the back of the car. The winch wasn’t powerful enough to pull the car by itself, but with three of us pushing, it was the extra power we needed—as well as a safety measure in case the car got away from us. I hauled the wheel over hard to correct the position and then we pushed/pulled the car up about 3/4 of the way inside. With that done, we jacked up each corner and put it on the dollies so that we could push it to the far side of the garage, as out of the way as possible.

Sunday morning I got out to the Travelall and cleaned off the inside roof with acetone before covering the whole thing with Rust-Stop. While that cured, I pulled the driver’s wheel and cleaned the outside face of the driver’s inner fender with the wire wheel. That was covered with Rust Encapsulator, and while that dried I painted the frame with chassis black. And while the can was open I painted the frame on the passenger side where the gas tank will go.

Inside the cab, I used some chalk to mark out where the sound deadener was going to go, and cut a sheet of kraft paper to test the measurements. After some adjustments I flattened the first sheet out and aligned the center with the centerline of the roof, and peeled a little of the backing off to set it in place. It took some work to get everything oriented correctly, and then I peeled one side off to set it permanently. Give or take 1/8″ on either side, I got it aligned almost perfectly; using the long edge to align the second and third sheets, I made it to the back of the truck centered on the rear doors.

By that point it was getting dark and cold, so I closed up the truck and moved into the basement to work on the base of the rear bench seat. After reviewing some how-to videos to refresh my memory, I cut burlap, foam and carpet padding down to fit the seat and attached the burlap to the frame with some hog rings. Then I stretched the cover over the bench as best I could, working to get the scallops in the back edge into place.

Stretching the cover and clipping it in with the hog rings is exactly the same process as stretching a canvas or mesh for screenprinting: start at the middle of each edge and work your way outwards. Again, the trickiest parts were the indents where the seat is scalloped to avoid the wheel wells, but I realized I could compress the whole seat by kneeling on it and used that to pull the fabric around to the attachment bars.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the results for my first attempt. I put the carpet padding on top of the foam, but Jeff tells me it’s supposed to go underneath, which is what I’ll do with the upright part of the seat. For this I wanted it to be firm directly underneath, and I wasn’t aware there was a firmer foam available for the seat when I bought my materials. I’ve got to carefully add some small holes for the four hinge bolts and the bump stops, which makes me nervous, but Jeff tells me it should be fine.

So next up I have to disassemble the upright for the rear seat and prep it for covering, which means I have to hit it with the wire wheel and spray it down with Rust Converter.

I’m headed north to see my family for Thanksgiving, and there’s a junkyard near my sister’s house with some ancient IH iron, including this rusty Travelall panel truck. I’m not sure what to expect, but he says he’s got other IH stuff in there somewhere, so it should be a fun day for bushwhacking. I bought a cordless angle grinder on contingency but I’m going to leave it in the box so that I can return it if I don’t need it.

Looking at the dashboard, it’s a ’62 or earlier, so it’ll be interesting to get a look at the front clip. At first blush the stuff I see that would be worth something would be the barn doors, but they look pretty rough. Just looking at this photo, the things I see that might be worth picking would be:

  • The barn doors, if they’re salvageable
    • if not, the mechanisms—latches, the rear handle, etc.
    • The windows
  • Any of the chrome—the rear taillights, for example
  • the rear doors, if they’re salvageable
    • Any of the interior mechanisms from these doors—scissors, latches, etc.
    • Chrome brightwork, interior steel surround
  • Either of the bumpers, if they’re in good shape
  • Front wing windows, if they’re OK.
  • Steering wheel/column, if I can get it out

I have no idea what the rest of the truck looks like, but I’ll see when we get out there. And even if the whole thing is a wreck it’ll be fun to go looking.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Weekend Recap, 11.24  |  Posted in Junkyards, Seats, Travelall

Small Victories

It’s been dry and mild here in Maryland for the past three weeks. Sunny, uncharacteristically warm weather yielded three weeks to enjoy beautiful changing leaves; usually there’s one day of beautiful color, it rains, and the trees are gray and naked until March. There’s also been lots of dry sunlight to work on the truck in shirtsleeves. The forecast for Sunday, however, was for rain, so I decided to visit the local pick & pull for some parts before everything turned into cold soupy mud. I was on the hunt for an electric steering unit from a 2009-2013 Toyota Corolla, and the app told me they had two on the lot. I carried in a metric-based tool roll and impact driver, and found the first car after a few minutes of confusion. Someone had already pulled the dash mostly apart, and most crucially, pulled the lower linkage from the bottom of the steering unit. The second Corolla on the lot didn’t have electric steering assist at all. So I consulted the website for alternatives and found a donor 2009 Nissan Versa several rows over that hadn’t been touched. It only took me several minutes to deconstruct the dashboard to get to the motor, and after a half an hour I figured out how to get it detached from the wheel, off the dashboard, and on the floor. Then I put a socket on the bottom of the linkage and with one mighty pull, got it disconnected from the car.

Back at the house, I laid it out on the bench, tested the motor on 12V power, and verified it worked. Laying it out on the floor with the two columns I’ve got, I’m not sure if I can use either one to make a new unit, but I think the one from the green truck will be the best candidate. Most likely I’ll cut the shaft at the bottom to disconnect it from the power steering unit at the bottom and find a way to construct one good unit out of the two. We’ll see.

The theory here is to have a unit that doesn’t need a computer or any other input to regulate the motor; with no signal from the CAN BUS, the attached ECU (that silver box) will always provide average power assist and return the wheel to center at any speed in what’s called fail-safe mode; and if the motor fails, it just reverts to manual steering. This is what Brian has on his Scout and it’s pretty slick—and his unit was from a Versa as well. Having driven his truck with both the manual and the power steering I can say it makes a huge difference, which is why I’m pursuing this project.

With my welder down, I had to pivot to smaller projects. As mentioned earlier, I had a bunch of things I wanted to knock out, and I got a fair bit of them done. First, I decided to use locknuts and washers to button up my mirrors. It took some travel to find someone with the correct stainless hardware in stock, but once I had that I got the passenger side closed up and mounted on the truck with little hassle. I’m glad I pulled the driver’s side off, because when I went to take the nuts off the rod snapped on both sides as it had on the other one. This was easy to put together, and it mounted quickly. Now both sides of the truck have refurbished, adjustable, period-correct mirrors.

Finally, I started to hunt down live wires on the rear of the truck. There’s a trailer plug with a tangle of wires hanging below the hitch that I can’t identify, so I turned the marker lights on and tested them for continuity. Nothing seemed to work. Another rusted bulb was hanging under the truck, so I tried that one as well; no dice. Looking up. I remembered there was a mystery wire running out of the rear quarter into the back of the door, and put the test wire on that: power! And turning the markers off killed it. So I put a splice on the wire from the license plate holder, connected it to the mystery wire, and used some new stainless hardware to permanently mount the assembly to the rear door. So that’s one more requirement checked off for a street-legal truck; unfortunately now the headlights aren’t working and the front turn signals aren’t lighting. So there’s more work to do.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Small Victories  |  Posted in Electrical, Junkyards, Travelall

Providence

Currently, the garage is ABSOLUTELY full; there’s barely any room to walk in there right now. Part of this coming weekend is going to be consumed by pulling all of the parts out, re-organizing them, and finding different homes for some of the bulkier things. The hood from the Green truck is going to have to go out behind the garage, and my plan was to do a local search to see who had wooden pallets they wanted to sell within a 5-mile radius of the house.

Cut to this morning, on the way to drop Finn off at school, I noticed a pallet leaning up against the telephone pole two doors down from our house, where our neighbor will often leave things for free pickup. I got back home, parked the car, and hustled over there to grab it before it disappeared. Sometimes, providence smiles on us.

Two of the Scout doors are also going to go outside until Bennett can make some room for them, or I sell them elsewhere. I’ve got just enough room under one of the shelves to tuck all four Travelall doors away, and then I’ve got to find a better solution for some of the bins. I’ve currently got two Scout II rear benches, so one of those will go on Marketplace, to Nationals, or to the dump. Other than the axles, I’m about 95% done with getting the passenger side quarter panel off in one piece.

I got the lineset ticket for the Green truck on Monday evening, which was nice; I’d ordered it weeks ago but the Wisconsin Historical Society is pretty swamped, I guess. Looking through the list of options offered no real surprises: the engine and transmission are still the same, the fancy interior package is there, as is the upgraded heater. One thing did catch my eye, though, and that had me going back to the Red truck’s LST to compare: the Green truck has 3.54 gears while the Red truck has 4.10’s. What this means, roughly, is that the Green truck is set up better for highway cruising than the Red: a shorter gear will offer lower MPG and top speed. For example, I have a 3:54 rear in Peer Pressure, which allows that great hulking beast to do 70 MPH on the freeway with no real trouble, other than the fact that it’s as aerodynamic as a brick and the suspension is made for hauling gravel. If my plan for the Red truck is to make it a comfortable highway cruiser, I want tall gears to take advantage of the engine.

So, I started thinking about pulling the axle out of the Green truck before it leaves. It’s the same basic RA15 unit in both trucks, but the axle shafts are different (the Green truck ends with a 5×5.5 bolt pattern while the Red truck is  5×4.5) so a  straight-up swap is out of the question at this point. I’d love to just yank it and then call the scrapper, but they generally want a vehicle to have two axles to easily drag onto a flatbed or hook up to a tow-behind. I’ve called around to a couple of scrappers in the area but they’re kind of dodgy on taking something without wheels. I’m going to keep calling and hopefully find someone up for the challenge.

I’ve had a standing store credit with IHPA after I returned some stuff last year, and now that the window is safely tucked away I figured I’d order some new rubber for it as well as the doors. When it gets a little reliably warmer outside I’m going to call the glass installer back and ask for the guy who put my replacements in last summer. Having new gaskets in both of the rear glass will go a long way to keeping things water-tight back there. The door rubber is another whole project, but once that’s in I won’t have to worry about leaks in the rest of the cabin.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Providence  |  Posted in Junkyards, Travelall