Here’s a video update from the past couple of weeks.
This covers the timing, rehanging the two front doors, working on Bennett’s pickup and saying goodbye to Mr. Hanky, and a 40-mile round trip in Darth Haul divided by a stop in his driveway to diagnose and free up the brake system.
I did some quick troubleshooting yesterday with the timing and found that my timing gun was set to 10˚ advanced, so the truck is still way ahead of where it should be. It’s also dieseling when I shut it down, which tells me the timing is way too advanced. On our truck text thread the other day, Bennett gave me some things to check over:
But she’s still not running correctly, so more diagnosis is required. And until I get the mechanical fuel pump fixed and installed, I’m going to need to wire the electric unit into the switched power fuse panel, because I keep forgetting to turn the damned thing off when I shut the truck down.
In retrospect, I’m very happy I decided to remove the Sniper and go back to the basics, because I would have been smashing my head against the wall for months trying to diagnose software when this a mechanical problem to begin with.
Last weekend, I pulled the Sniper out of the engine bay and tucked it safely away in a box in the garage. The mechanical fuel pump is back on the truck, but it gave me a fight the last couple of days—it wouldn’t prime, and it sits uncomfortably close to the engine mount. Thursday morning I bypassed it with an electric pump and fed the carb directly. Once it fired, the engine tried to run away on me, so I reset the mixture screws to baseline. That’s when I found a huge vacuum leak at the back of the carb. After sealing that up, it settled into a decent idle. I set timing back to about 10°, which feels a lot more reasonable, dropped the hood, and took it for a spin around the block. The choke cable still needs to be hooked back up, but once it warmed up it drove fine. Heavy throttle still causes it to bog, so there’s more tuning ahead, but it’s already a big improvement.
I do want to pull the electric fuel pump off. Now that the lines are primed I want to hook the mechanical back up and see if it will pull fuel; if not, I’m going to pull the trigger on a rebuild kit for the original unit, which fits the truck better in any case.
Meanwhile, I painted the new plywood panel for the rear bed with a marine oil-based primer, countersunk the bolt holes, and rolled on two coats of Raptor Liner front and back. I have some fresh hardware in hand to put it in more permanently, although I have to go back out to get more bolts—the ones they used are an odd thread count for their size.
Lastly, I tore down a spare rear door to salvage the good glass, cleaned the tracks, and swapped it into the red truck. Once I knew the steps, the job was quick and straightforward. While I had the door apart, I pulled the handle, chased out a bit more rust, skimmed it, and gave it a fresh coat of paint.
I’m spending a lot of time going back and refreshing my carburetor knowledge, which means I’m reading a lot of articles and watching a bunch of videos. I’m going to do a link dump here so I can close a bunch of browser tabs.
Labor Day weekend we had absolutely nothing planned, so I took advantage of free time and mild weather to focus on getting Darth Haul running reliably. Saturday morning, after walking the dog and having breakfast with the girls, I went out and set up all of the diagnostic equipment I’ve collected for carbureted engines: a vintage dwell/tach/volt gauge, a vacuum gauge, and a timing light. I hooked the boat tank up to the engine and painted marks on the flywheel and timing marks with a white Sharpie, then ran it up to temperature. Messing around with the distributor, I found that it was happiest running at over 20˚ of advance, which is definitely not the way it should be. Anytime I brought the timing back down to a comfortable 10˚ the engine got choppy and began to die.
I put the light on the Scout just to see where the baseline for a smooth-running engine was, and verified that was at around 8˚, which is what I remembered from the service manual. No amount of distributor adjustment could get it to calm down. Puzzled, I zeroed out the carb and adjusted the mixture screws and the idle to get the engine to slow down, and was happy to find that the stumble at acceleration was gone. At idle I was pulling 20 inches of vacuum pressure. With the engine running better (but not timed correctly), I took it for a spin around the block and was happy to find it didn’t stall out once. I also noticed the speedometer isn’t working.
At around this point my Harbor Freight timing light died, so I had to run out and get a replacement. Strangely, it took a while to get the truck to start when I got back; I’d left it at 10˚ or so, and had to adjust it a bunch before it would catch again. I continued messing with the timing but couldn’t resolve the issue. Stumped, I stepped back and cleaned the truck up as much as possible for Cars & Coffee the next morning: I swapped out the old wood floor in the back for the new one, swept out the dust, and cleaned all the windows.
Sunday morning I made some coffee and ran the truck up in the driveway before taking it for a spin down the road. I pulled in to C&C and parked it next to a sexy Morgan 8, and I was soon joined by Bennett in his Speedster.
The Travelall was an immediate hit with the crowd; I got a lot of questions about what it is and where I got it, as well as whether I’d driven it a long ways with the boat tank. We had a good turnout, and at one point I was parked across from an Acura NSX and a McLaren.
Back at the house I did a bunch of straightening up in the garage, and David stopped by to pick up a bunch of parts I’d sourced for him at Nats and elsewhere. I was able to pass along the passenger fender and 6-cylinder air cleaner from Ohio, as well as a set of metal door cards I got in Pittsburgh, a pair of escutcheons, and the two eyebrow sections I’d cut off the truck in New York. He was super-happy to take delivery, and headed back to his house to get his truck running after a long pause.
One thing he mentioned to me was that he’d talked to a local spring guy about rebuilding his spring packs, and was quoted a reasonable price to do so. I was VERY intrigued to hear about this, as my springs are also as flat as a board. This would be an excellent fall-winter project, as it would require jacking the truck onto stands and pulling the springs off.
Sunday afternoon we ran a bunch of errands but after getting back home I put my spare door on the worktable and started breaking it down to pull the glass out. What I wound up having to do was take the black inner surround out, pop the clips holding the felt out, and prep the top half to be able to slide the rails and window out as a unit. Both of the screws holding the lower ends of the rails were, predictably, rusted solid, so I hit them with PBblaster but resolved to cut them out with a death wheel. The only angle grinder I’ve got that fits inside the door is the cheap pneumatic one I got from Harbor Freight, and here I was stopped dead by a leaking/broken moisture filter on the compressor. After picking up some new fittings I repaired that after dinner, and got things ready to start on Monday morning.
A few weeks ago, Bennett had gotten a call from a guy who had a mixture of old pickup parts and passed along his info to me. There were some pictures of C-series stuff that I was partially interested in, so after walking the dog and doing some chores around the house I drove a half an hour north to meet up with him. In his garage he had boxes of assorted parts, which I picked through carefully. I wound up going light: a reproduction MT-118 parts catalog for A, B and C-series trucks, a pair of beautiful black C-series sun visors, an ashtray in great shape, an NOS accelerator pedal, and one mirror assembly to pass on to Tyler out in Frederick.
Between odd jobs around the house, I fired up the compressor to notch the two screws at the bottom of the green door enough to turn with a screwdriver, then gently pulled the rails out to free up the glass. When that was done, it was easy to get the glass out. It’s in good shape, and after I wire-wheeled the metal bracket at the bottom, I taped it off and sprayed it with Rust-Stop. Getting the broken pane out of Darth is going to be a challenge, but now I know what I’m doing, and barring any major rust issues, it should be relatively straightforward to swap the glass in.
I also couldn’t help myself and swapped the black visors into the truck. They’re just a little bit longer than the gold ones that came out of the green truck, so they don’t fit into the clips next to the rearview easily. But they look great!
Ever since I bought Darth Haul, I’ve been collecting and taking photos of other similar trucks for reference, especially for things that didn’t come with or weren’t installed in my truck. One of the things I’ve currently been trying to sort out are the placement of the rear seatbelts, which were never installed in my truck.
Looking at some of my reference photos, I finally clued in on something that wasn’t installed in my truck—those two recessed mounts in the center of the floor that I found in the green truck. Darth’s tub was drilled for the belts on each side of the seat, on the floor next to the doors, but there was no provision for the center belts. One of the photos showed something that should have been clear as day to me earlier: the center mounts were probably drilled in to the vertical face of the step behind the seat, and the two recessed mounts are for a third seatbelt pair in the center of the bench.
My bed was drilled for the seatbelts on the sides of the step, but not for the clips on the wheel wells that the seat clicks into, in this same place:
So I’ve got a basic gameplay for the outer belts, but I’d like to know where the two inside belts are mounted on the step so I can put them in the right place—or find one more clip-style belt and use that instead.
No word on the Travelall this week. I was hopeful they might call me sometime Friday to pick it up, but I didn’t hear anything.
Meanwhile, I was out in Frederick shooting video for work, and when I was done with that, I texted my Travelall acquaintance Tyler, who’d told me a while back he had a bunch of parts left over from his project. We were only about five miles away so it was a short drive over to his house. He showed me the updates to his truck, which is now running and driving, and it is beautiful. He put a Crown Vic subframe under the front and a SBC in the engine bay, tubbed the rear wheels, and put the whole thing on bags. He fired it up and it sounds loud and mean. We looked over the other stuff he’s done, including installing an inexpensive headliner kit from Jegs, and traded some information on parts.
His headliner is a five-piece set, which might not work with the bows I’ve got, but I liked the look of it. I also looked carefully at the shoulder belts he put in, with nutserts on the B and C-pillars. I’ve been thinking about how I would add shoulder belts to my truck, and I like the way he put his in. So there’s some inspiration for a winter project there.
When I got back home, I went through the bin and catalogued it. There’s some stuff I was happy to find—things I’ve been looking for, and a couple of things I’d forgotten about:
Also in the bin were
I know I can find a good home for a bunch of this stuff; I also sent him photos of my tailgate in the hopes that a guy he knows can use it for another project. So I owe him a trunkful of very good beer, or perhaps some good bourbon if he’s a cocktail sort of guy. We’ll see.
The good news is that I installed a brand new starter on the Travelall this weekend. The bad news is that the battery might be screwed. Let me explain:
I’ve known the starter that came with the truck was going to need to be replaced since I bought the truck. It’s made a funny noise at the end of the start cycle the entire time I’ve had it, and lately it’s been showing its damage by heating up the battery cables after just a few uses. So I bought a new one on RockAuto and made plans to swap it out. I put the canopy over the front of the truck, jacked it up onto stands, and started the difficult task of removing the old one. It’s in an impossible location: between the frame rail and the engine, and directly over both the front axle and Y-pipe from the manifold.
Once I’d gotten that out, I bench-tested the new one to verify it was working correctly, then hefted it up into place to bolt it up to the truck. When that was done and I was reasonably sure I had all the connections correct, I moved forward, pulled the mechanical fuel pump off the truck, and replaced it with a steel block-off plate I made last weekend. There’s no reason to have a useless pump leaking oil everywhere.
I had to mess with the electrical connections a couple of times to get the truck to wake up, and I got it to start quickly and easily twice before trying to bump the transmission free, with no success. But then the truck refused to start—the electrical system refused to do anything at all, actually. I went out and found that the battery was hot to the touch, so I pulled it out and set it on the ground. It remained hot for hours afterwards, which leads me to believe I crossed wires on the starter somehow.
Update: verified. I pulled the battery out of the Scout, dropped it in place, hooked up the ground, and touched the hot lead to the battery: the starter immediately tried to engage, which means something is screwed up with the wiring. I did verify that the two extra wires are going to the right poles on the solenoid: the 12-12 wire goes to the R terminal, and the 14-12 wire goes to the S terminal. So I’ll have to get back under the truck, take the wires off, verify they’re all clean and not shorting on each other, and re-install.
Bench-testing the old starter confirmed my suspicions: it still works, but there’s a terrible noise at the end of the cycle when the gear retracts back into place—it sounds like the unit is grinding as it spins down.
In better news, I sprayed the two hubcaps I got at Nats with oven cleaner to remove the red paint; as it turns out there was a layer of red over black over white, but it all came off easily, and with a detailed scrub with some OOO steel wool I got both of them sparkling again. They look so good I’m kicking myself for not having bought four.
Finally, I took advantage of a coupon code and bought an EFI tuner training course so that I can properly tune the Sniper on the Travelall. I asked the IT guys at work if they had any decommissioned laptops I could buy, and they just gave me one they were going to e-cycle. It’s a 2021 Dell that’s got plenty of horsepower to run the Sniper software; it was gratifying to load the config file and see it in full color on the machine. From what I’ve seen in the videos so far, I’m probably going to have to spring for an extra cable to connect the laptop directly to the carb in order to make tweaks in real time.
Saturday afternoon was free of commitment, so I made a plan Friday night. I’m still working backwards with the EFI to try and diagnose the fuel/air mixture issues, so I thought I’d try to replicate the success I had two weekends ago by swapping the old carb back on, run the engine up to temperature, and then slap the Sniper back on to see if it would begin learning.
The first thing I did was download updated firmware to the SD card and updated the handheld and computer in the carb. The original file was six years old, so I figure they’d made a lot of updates since then.
I set the worktable up in the driveway, hauled all of the tools and hardware back out, and set up a camera. Pulling the Sniper off and putting the old carb on is easy at this point, and while I was there I removed the clear fuel filter I’d installed after the first two on the EFI fuel line. I strapped the boat tank to the bumper, connected the battery leads to the electric pump, and filled the float bowl. It only took two turns of the key to get it to light off, and with one adjustment I had it idling happily. I let it run for about ten minutes with the cap off the radiator, and then noticed it began bubbling, so I put the cap back on. I’d topped the cooling system off with about 3/4 of a gallon last week so I wasn’t afraid to run it this time.
When it was good and hot I shut it down, capped off the fuel, and pulled the 2300 off the engine. The Sniper went back on easily (I hadn’t disconnected anything) and I connected the electrical leads back up to the battery. Crossing my fingers, I fired up the engine and smiled as it started idling smoothly—faster than I wanted, but smoothly. I let it idle for a while and recorded a couple of log files for diagnosis, then shut it down to see if it would start and run consistently, which it did.
Then I tried to use it to bump the clutch, where you basically put it in middle gear, stomp the brakes, and start the engine. The force of the starter is supposed to break the clutch away from the flywheel. But my starter is very sick, so I couldn’t get it to budge. I shut the engine down and let it cool off for the evening.
Sunday morning between showers I walked back out and tried a cold start. This was the real test: to see if the Sniper unit had learned anything. I said a prayer, turned the key, and it fired right up—but more importantly, it idled smoothly and a lot slower than it had when it was warm. I did hear the fuel pump whining on the rail when I gave it gas, so I have to ask the pros whether or not that’s normal. I took another data log and saved it to my computer, and buttoned the truck up as it began raining.
The other thing I noticed was that the engine is leaking at the mechanical fuel pump location, so I fabbed up a flat steel block off plate out of 16 ga. steel for when I get under there and pull the pump off.
That’s about all I can do this week with our trip to Nats coming up; I haven’t heard back from the transmission shop yet, but I’m going to call on Monday to see if they can give me a time estimate, and that will dictate my travel plans.
I had a plan going in to Sunday morning, after sitting back and thinking about all of the symptoms I’ve been facing with the carburetor. Typically when i’m working on mechanical or computer problems I’ll diagnose things backwards until I get to something I know is working. Then I move forward until I’ve identified the fault. On the carburetor, I knew that the engine spark timing was off, and the only good way I know to adjust that is to loosen the distributor while the engine is running and spin it slowly until the idle smooths out.
I figured the best way to do this was to put the old Holley 2300 back on the engine and work through the problem mechanically. Unbolting the Sniper from the engine, I put it aside, resting on some cardboard, and disconnected all of the wiring. I pulled the old carb from one of my spares bins and swapped it onto the engine, plumbing it to the boat tank through an electric fuel pump. With a couple squirts of 50-1 gas in the throat, the engine fired right up but sounded very choppy and died off after about 10 seconds. I got a couple of backfires out the throat of the carb—a sure sign of bad timing.
After verifying this was consistent behavior, I got it running long enough to get out to the distributor and slowly twist until the idle smoothed out and the throttle picked up. Then I tightened the mixture screws (they were wide open from last fall, when I was battling the dead condenser thinking it was a fuel issue) and adjusted the throttle until it was idling happily by itself.
Relieved, I let it run for about 10 minutes and shut it down, figuring it was warmed up enough to give the Sniper a hand. The learning feature in the Sniper control unit kicks in after the engine is warmed up past 160˚, and that was what I was shooting for: I wanted it to learn how to adjust the fuel/air mixture and self-meter. Friday evening I’d pulled the water neck open and examined the thermostat that was in the engine. I figured I’d find something crustier than a wino’s beard but the passages and thermostat looked almost brand-new, which was a pleasant surprise. I put a new 180˚ unit in and closed it back up.
I hustled around the engine and got the Sniper back in place in about 10 minutes, verifying I had reconnected the electric leads to everything, said a Hail Mary, and fired it off. It started immediately, and ran a lot smoother than it originally did—but was still hunting for the right fuel/air ratio, surging and fading. I let it run for a couple of minutes, noting that the temperature was reading 178˚ but knowing that the radiator wasn’t full, and shut it down after watching the Learn setting on the control unit struggle to balance things out.
I tried to restart after a couple of minutes but the battery sounded tired, so I hooked the tender back up and let it cool down. The Sniper says it’s reading 14 volts when the engine surges, but I’d bet the alternator is dead so I’ll source a new one after I verify its condition.
So: I know that the timing on the engine is set more correctly than it had been. I know that the Sniper will start the engine and run more consistently than it had been. I know I probably need to adjust the timing settings in the control unit again to better match the engine, and I know that the water passages are clean—but need more coolant.
With a little more time to kill, I got my 3M automotive tape out and finally put the International badge on the rear door. Looking at the rear quarter, I decided I wanted to add the Travelall badge that belonged there too. With the taillight removed I was able to see where the bondo had filled up the original mounting holes and used a chisel to carefully scrape it away to where I could see them. Then I drilled them out and widened them until the posts on the badge fit the holes perfectly. With some more tape the badge went on easily, and now the truck looks even more legit than before.