Category: Progress

Fuel Injection Update, 4.14

A proper inlet fitting arrived in the mail on Friday and I had to wait until Sunday morning after the rain had passed to do a test fitting on the carburetor. I could only get one in blue, but you’ll never see it under the air cleaner. Thankfully, it cleared the water neck with about a half an inch to spare, so I tightened it down and made a list of preflight checks that had to be done before fired off the engine. First, I replaced the existing positive battery cable with a bigger fatter one. I’ve always wondered if I’m not getting enough cranking amps from the existing cable and decided to improve that situation. This took a little more time than I thought because the starter is in a really lousy position on C series trucks. It’s in between the engine and the frame rail and directly over the front axle so it’s going to be very difficult to swap out if that has to happen.

Then I pulled the plugs and put a borescope down into the cylinders one by one to check for any water in the cylinders. I did this because I drained a bunch of water out of the gas tank and I was afraid I’d pulled a bunch into the engine and possibly done some damage. I found no evidence of water or rust, just dirty piston heads that need to be cleaned up with a long idle and some time on the road.

Next, I had to get a bunch of new gas and get it into the tank, which is harder than it looks because I don’t have an angled funnel. After visits the three different stores I found something that mostly worked and put about 4 gallons of gas in the tank. Interestingly, the first time I turned the key to the accessory position, the fuel gauge worked, but it worked  intermittently since then, so I’ll have to figure that out. With that done and the wiring to the Sniper connected, I cleaned out a jug and set it up in the engine bay to catch fuel.

The first test of the system is to boot it up and program it for the type of engine, cam, idle speed, and a couple of other settings. Then you program it, and do a couple of fuel system flushes to run clean gas to the system. After I did this, I connected the fuel lead up to the carburetor, said a prayer, and cranked it over for the first time.

It didn’t immediately catch, and I noticed that the Sniper control unit had rebooted itself; this should remain on constantly. Doing a little Internet digging I learned that other people have had this problem and it’s got to do with a gap in continuity when turning the key. Walking back through the main points of failure, I tested the jumper to switched power on the fuse panel and verified that was OK. The power leads to the harness were connected correctly. That left the ignition barrel.

This ignition barrel is brand new. I bought it the first year I had the truck, and I believe it’s been wired correctly, but clearly I’m going to have to pull it out of the dash and check it over again. I’ve got two spares I can swap in for testing—the original and the one out of the ’67. I’m going to go out and take some detailed pictures of the ’67 barrel and the one in the truck and compare them, along with the diagram I have from the service manual. I’ve been thinking about pulling that one apart and swapping in one of the new ignition cylinders (I don’t have a key for either one) so that could be a cheap way to test the system, with the added benefit of getting the entire truck to work on one key.

Finally, I checked for spark while I was turning the engine over on the #5 cylinder and didn’t see anything on the indicator, so that’s another thing to check.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Fuel Injection Update, 4.14  |  Posted in Fuel Injection, Travelall

Fuel Injection Video Update

Here’s the wrap-up video from the past two weeks, which includes all of the work I did installing fuel injection and the eventual solution to fixing the barn door lock mechanism, which involved a Dremel and some very careful surgery on a lock cylinder. This one took some time to produce because I was working with ~90 gigs of video footage which brought my computer to a crawl.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Fuel Injection Video Update  |  Posted in Fuel Injection, Travelall, Video

Fuel Injection Update

With the exception of one stupid fitting, the Sniper is installed on the truck, the fuel tank is back in place with a new sending unit and return line, and the hoses are (hopefully) routed in a way that will feed fuel to the engine reliably. This was not without struggle, and required a lot of problem-solving.

First, I was having issues with electrical continuity in the original fuel sender. I could measure resistance at certain points in the swing of the arm but it wasn’t consistent and no amount of adjustment was working reliably. I was afraid the issue might be my $9 Harbor Freight multimeter so I splurged on a fancier $25 model and got the same result. Doing some research, I learned that there are new senders available, but only for the 15 gallon tanks installed on pickups, which are a different size than the 19 gallon tank I have. I did track down a forum post from 2007 which claimed that a sender from a 1957 Thunderbird would fit with minor modifications, and the pictures seemed to show something very similar to what I already had. So I took advantage of a solid return policy and ordered one from AutoZone with free one-day shipping.

On the bench, when I compared it to the original sender, it looked a little different, but putting both of the units on the bench base and comparing the arc of the center arm, and their length showed that they were roughly the same. The new unit has a brass float and tested flawlessly with the multimeter, so I went ahead and put that in the tank. After cleaning the inlets on the tank out, I sealed everything up and got it ready to put back in the truck. This took a bit of maneuvering, but once I had the hoses in place, I jacked it up and got it into position.

At this point, it was clear I would have to modify the tank straps to allow for the extra inch and a half I had to add between the tank and the body of the truck to clear the return inlet. I cut the brackets off with the cut off wheel, and fabricated some new straps out of 16 gauge steel. After welding the brackets onto the strap extensions, I brought them out to the truck and welded the two sections of strap together. When they were cold, I cleaned them up, painted them, and then got them ready to hang the tank.

This had taken a lot more time that I thought it would. I fed the sender wire over the frame rail, hooked it back up to the wiring harness and fed the return line up through the body mount to the engine bay. Working methodically, I reattached all of the hoses to the fill tube, the vent tube and the fuel line itself. I was very careful measuring and cutting the hose that had come with the Sniper kit and it looks like I’ve got just enough to finish the job. The only thing left to solve is finding a 90° fitting for the fuel inlet on the carburetor, which butts up right next to the water neck on the engine. I’d ordered two 90° fittings and had them sent overnight via the jungle site, but the second fitting is just too long to fit in the space available. So I’ve got a call Holley’s tech support line to see if they can suggest a solution.

At this point, everything is complete, minus that fitting. When I’ve got that solved, I can put gas back in the tank, run a bunch of it through the system to flush it, and do all of the preflight checks for the carburetor computer. The other check I wanna do before anything else happens is to pull a couple of the spark plugs and eyeball the cylinders for any sign of water or rust. After draining a bunch of water out of the fuel tank, I’m concerned about it being in the cylinders, and I want to look for any signs of hydrolocking. If there is any water in there, I’ll bump the engine over a bunch of times to clear it out.

In non-engine related news, I did a bunch of work on the rear barn door handle on the bench to fit a door lock correctly in the barrel without having it fall out. What I had to do was take a Dremel and carefully carve a channel out of the back of the lock cylinder to accept a standard lockring. I used the pair of pliers to squeeze it down to be the same diameter as the cylinder, trimmed the outside edges, and then inserted it into the barrel. I was able to get a pair of lockring pliers inside and open it up so that it stayed inside the barrel. I installed it first thing Friday morning and just like that I had a locking rear door for the truck.

I’m sorry, I would have taken pictures but I was hustling pretty much all day Sunday from 10AM to about 7PM to get this done. I was able to get the truck down off the jack stands and under a tarp just as dusk was falling. Monday morning is rainy so I’ll see if I can get back out there on Tuesday to open things back up.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Fuel Injection Update  |  Posted in Fuel Injection, Travelall, Welding

Fuel Injection: How It’s Going

I’ve got the week off from work to burn up excess PTO time so I’ve been focusing mainly on the EFI install and procrastinating by tackling some smaller projects on the side. The EFI install is intimidating because it includes lot of things I’ve never done before and presents some mechanical problems that are proving difficult to solve. The instructions begin with the simple task of installing a fuel pump and two fuel filters in between the gas tank and the engine. This also includes a return line, something modern fuel injection needs, but my truck never came with. So that required dropping the tank again, drilling a hole somewhere in the tank, and plumbing a new line. Another complicating factor, as mentioned earlier, was that there’s little to no room in between the outlet on the tank to the engine compartment, which made the fuel pump location a huge question mark.

Dropping the tank was easy; I’ve already done that once. But when I drained the tank, I found a pint of what I can only assume was water, which was very disturbing. I know I emptied this tank out completely before I reinstalled it and I know I capped off all of the inlets so I don’t understand where this water came from. What I’m most concerned about is that I’ve been trying to start it and I’m afraid I may have hydrolocked the engine by squirting water into the cylinders instead of gasoline. After some deliberation, I’m going to continue with the EFI install on this engine, assuming I haven’t bent any pushrods, and we’ll see.

After the tank was down, I measured and test fitted and measured again and found the best possible place for the return line, right next to the sender hole at the top of the tank. This is the only place I could get fingers inside to tighten any bolts. I filled the tank with water, drilled a pilot hole, and then used a stepped bit to widen it out. The fittings that come with the kit were all aluminum, so I needed a wire to fish them back out after dropping them in the tank the first fourteen times, and found that using the wire was the best way to help guide the parts into place. I also fabricated a bent wrench out of 16 gauge steel to help tighten the fitting up inside the tank. After flushing it out with more water, I installed the return line and bench-tested the fuel sender, but wasn’t getting reliable readings. When I got the truck, the fuel sender actually worked, but I’m not sure what happened after I pulled it out. My multimeter is the $9 Harbor Freight special, so I decided I needed to upgrade that to something a little more legitimate.

Underneath the truck, I found the best possible place for the fuel pump and pre-filter was on the inside of the frame rail. That was all still filthy, so I scraped and wire brushed it, then painted it with encapsulator. The only way I could figure on routing  the fuel line was to direct it backwards to the inside frame rail, do a 180° curve to the pre filter and pump, then go up to the engine bay. I ordered aluminum fuel hose for the bends because I didn’t want the hose kinking up over time and restricting the flow.

While I was puzzling over those problems, I was fixing smaller things like a sagging driver’s door. After lifting it up with a bottle jack, I loosened then tightened the hinge bolts and it closed cleanly. Then I bent some 16 gauge steel into an L shape, drilled it out, cleaned it with a file, and used it as an under dash bracket to install a USB charger.

Thursday started out being a gloomy, rainy day, but after about 2 o’clock, the weather cleared, the sun came up, and it warmed up to about 75°. In the morning, I drove up to a locksmith in Towson to have them look over the rear door handle and help me understand the problem I was having with the new lock cylinders falling out of the assembly. The guy behind the counter was super helpful, but he couldn’t figure out what we were missing. After talking it through with him, he agreed that I needed a spring loaded retainer clip at the back of the regular door handle lock cylinder, and that the ignition cylinder wouldn’t work in the door. I was hoping I would have more answers than that, but he got me to thinking about a way to solve the problem. I stopped off at Harbor freight for a better multi tester and then headed back home.

I took full advantage of the afternoon, warmth and pulled the old carb off the engine, cleaned up the intake, and dropped the sniper in place. After reading and rereading the installation instructions, I started roughing in the wiring in the engine bay to begin to understand where things need to go. Alternating between the engine and the frame rail, I sorted out most of the main electrical harness and crimped and soldered leads for the positive and negative battery terminals aligned for the controller is fished into the cab, and the main fuse and relay harness is roughed in on the firewall. I did find that the temperature sensor included with the kit is one size larger than the threaded hole in the water neck. I have a spare manifold sitting on the floor of the garage that I can examine to see how hard it would be to drill and tap a wider temperature sender. Of course, I’m of getting metal shavings in the engine, so this is the nuclear option. The other installation issue is that both the fuel inlet and return outlet on the carburetor are right up against the water neck and coil so I put a pair of 90° fittings on my parts list.

Under the truck, I finished the fuel pump install and with a handy delivery from Amazon, I had 10 feet of coiled aluminum fuel hose in my hands. It just so happened that they had coiled the inside loop at a little less than 6″ so all I had to do was cut off a section of the inner coil and I already had a clean 180° bend in my hands. I flared the ends and installed that, then started looking for a way to get the fuel line to the inside of the frame rail. I found a factory-drilled hole large enough to feed another 90° bend just above the spring perch and threaded an another length of aluminum through to join up with the rubber hose. It feels Mickey Mouse, but I think I’ve solved the fuel routing problems and I was happy that I was able to use the brake flare kit I bought two years ago on this aluminum. Then I used a punch to put a divot in the exhaust pipe, drilled out a hole, and installed the O2 sensor. The clamps provided with the kit were too small so I used a set of pipe clamps from my bench for the time being until I can get factory clamps in hand. When I get those I’m going to pull the 02 sensor back out and wire-brush the pipe for a better mating surface.

I got back up and worked in the engine bay on the wiring until it got dark and then brought some parts in to the workbench in the basement. The first task was to modify one of the door lock cylinders to accept a snap ring at the very back using a Dremel. I carefully cut a channel out of the rear of the cylinder and trimmed a snap ring down to the same diameter. Inserting that into the channel and inserting it into the button, I used a pair of snap ring pliers to widen it out so that it stayed in place but spun freely. Reassembling the handle, it finally worked as designed and I had something I could put back on the truck.

Next, I spent a good bit of time testing the original fuel sender with the new multimeter and found that it did work, but that was dependent on the angle of the float arm. Sometimes it made contact with the rheostat and sometimes it didn’t. Doing a little more research, somebody on the Binder Planet posted that the sending unit for a ’57 Thunderbird would work with a little bit of modification, so I put that on the parts list.

I’ve been itching to just get it done but have been practicing my patience as much as possible, and as of Friday I’m pretty happy with where I’ve gotten to. The biggest hurdles now are to understand the wiring setup, and I’m going to take my time to understand what I’m doing before I start hacking things up.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   1 Comment on Fuel Injection: How It’s Going  |  Posted in Fuel Injection, Travelall

Weekend Recap

Looking through the Sniper install instructions, it’s looking like the most complicated part of the whole thing is going to be dealing with the fuel tank. Essentially, I’m going to need to empty it completely, drop it again, let it dry out, fill it with water, and drill a hole in the top for a return line. Fuel injection requires a return line to the tank for somewhere to put the extra gas, so I have to sort that out. Thankfully, the kit comes with all the hardware required, so that isn’t an issue.

The next puzzle is figuring out where to put the fuel pump and prefilter. Because the fuel tank is under the passenger frame rail and the fuel outlet is directly behind the passenger wheel, the fuel line routes up through the passenger wheel well and up to the fuel pump, only about 2 1/2 feet in total length. The pump and prefilter aren’t small, and when they’re mounted together they’re about 18″ long. I really don’t want to mount the fuel pump right next to the wheel, so I’ve gotta find a different place to put it. Ideally, it would go inside the frame rail, but that means I have to reverse the direction of the fuel outlet, and find a way to loop the fuel hose around without kinking it. The extra added problem is that the exhaust pipe is on the passenger side of the truck, about 8 inches away from that frame rail, so whatever goes on there needs to have heat shielding.

The obvious solution to this whole problem would be to cut the receiver hitch off the back of the truck and hang a new gas tank under the center of the rear floor. Of course, I’d have to figure out how to plumb a new filler line and solve a bunch of other problems that I’m not ready to face. So that’s out.

While thinking all of the stuff through, I scraped and wire brushed the inside of the frame rail under the passenger side, hit it with rust converter, and then coated it with rust encapsulator. Both frame rails need this treatment, as I’ve done almost all of the outside edges, but because it sits so low to the ground, it’s really hard to get to the inside.

Stalling for time, I spent Saturday afternoon trimming out the already butchered original radio faceplate for a single DIN-sized radio  head unit from the Scout. Then, I repaired the wiring and mounted it in the truck along with a set of old school carpeted truck boxes we got from the repo lot thirty years ago.

On Sunday, we had plans to help our friend Brian install a two post lift in his new garage across the river in Chestertown. I met up with Bennett at a park-and-ride where he was waiting in his 67 Mustang with a seat full of parts and a warm coffee. From there, we caravanned across the bridge to Brian’s house. The plan was to drop the Mustang off at Brian’s so that he could install electric steering in the Ford like he did in his Scout 800.

After getting a little coffee and taking the tour, we started by sorting out all of the pieces and parts of the posts of the lift. We hefted  the first post onto dollies and moved it into position. With three of us, it wasn’t too difficult to push it up and sit into place, and Brian drilled the holes in the concrete to set it. Thankfully, the concrete only got poured a year ago, so it was easy to drill into. Then we moved the second post in a place and assembled the crossbar to hang between the two posts.

The weather was absolutely perfect for working outside and by lunchtime I had changed into shorts. The instructions that came with the kit were lousy, and didn’t explain which hardware went to what. This would not have been a problem if all of the hardware was the same size, but we had to guess between sizes for different applications. Once we sorted all that out, we hung the equalizing cables, electrical line, and hydraulic lines. While Brian was sorting out the wiring for the hydraulic pump, Bennett and I hung the four arms off the lift shuttles and set the pads in place. We left the entire thing anchored in the ground and ready for electrical hookup, which Brian is probably going to finish this week.

Bennett and I packed up my Scout and we headed back west with the sides rolled up in full Safari mode, enjoying the cool evening air. We stopped for a tailgate dinner of gyros right before we hit the bridge and made it back to his house as dusk was falling. I got word in his driveway that my niece and nephew were waiting with the girls at our local ice cream stand, so I hightailed it back to our neighborhood for a chocolate shake with the family.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Weekend Recap  |  Posted in Friends, Fuel Injection, Trip Logs

Back to Life

Getting Darth started and running has been at the top of my list for the last month, and it’s been postponed by bad weather. Jen was out of town this Saturday and I wanted to take advantage of that—she hates the exhaust fumes—so I got to work as soon as I could. The first issue was fuel. Last weekend I had her running off fuel I poured in the carb but I couldn’t get her running long enough to pull fuel up into the filter. The other issue was that the negative battery cable had given up and was getting hot to the touch almost immediately after cranking, so I swapped in a new one.

I started out yesterday by hooking my electric pump up to the hose right below the filter and verifying that the pickup wasn’t blocked. With that setup I got her idling roughly off the boat tank, having to stay next to the carb to alternately adjust the choke and accelerator. I backed the idle screws out a quarter and then a half turn with no effect, and kept her running for about five minutes before shutting her down. The idle is more of a gallop, which definitely points to fuel issues, and it’s different than when I had her running last year. The good news is that the exhaust is clear—there’s no white or blue smoke.

I pulled the electric fuel pump off and tried running it off the mechanical unit with no luck. Figuring something was wrong with the mechanical unit, I jacked up the front end, crawled underneath, and pulled it off. It was full of fuel, and I couldn’t see any issues with it—no leaks or damage. So I put it back on, tightened up the connections, and figured I’d sit back and have a think.

The easiest and quickest solution is to just buy a new pump (and a couple of filters), but before I fire the parts cannon I want to review what I know and see if there’s anything I’m missing. The way I’m seeing it, the next move is:

  1. Replace the fuel filter and see if it’ll pull from the tank. If not,
  2. Put the electric pump on to prime the mechanical pump, and see if that cleans up the idle. if not,
  3. Replace the mechanical pump and see if that pulls from the tank.

That took the better part of the morning into the afternoon, and by then the wind was picking up. It started as a warm day but got colder as a front moved in, so I did some minor stuff inside the cab and then moved to the garage. I cut a new pattern for the bench seat support out of 20 gauge steel, measured and marked everything out, and trimmed it up. Then I screwed my bender into the floor and carefully aligned things up. 20 gauge steel is much easier to bend than 16 (what was I thinking) and in about an hour I had a new support formed, with the final adjustments to be made when I cut the old piece out of the truck.

While I’ve got the girl up on jack stands, I’m going to spray the area between the clutch and flywheel with some PBblaster to see if I can get the two to separate. If by some chance I can free things up, I can avoid a costly tow and transmission job, which I’d love to be able to do.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Back to Life  |  Posted in Carburetor, Travelall

Radio, Radio

Looking ahead to the days when Darth is actually on the road, I was eyeballing the empty hole in the dashboard where a radio once lived, especially now that I’ve got a good power source. As mentioned before I think I threw out the old radio that was with the truck, but I’ve still got a period correct radio from the green Travelall. At first, I thought it was a Ford or Chevy unit based on some very quick research but doing deeper digging led me to a very thorough website with actual pictures and I was actually able to identify it as a Motorola 7SMI, which was standard for Internationals of that year.

This particular unit only had three wires coming out of the back: a black wire ending at one side of a fusible link and two green wires that ended in a terminal connector labeled 22. It stands to reason the black wire was power and I guessed the green wires were for speakers. Much like everything else in the truck, I assumed the whole thing was grounded by the chassis, but none of the service manual diagrams I have for any year showed wiring for a radio at all.

These units were developed at a turning point for car electronics, when things were moving from tubes to transistors and circuit boards, so they are a mixture of the old and the new. This one is filled with old capacitors and sported a phenolic-based circuit board, which was the industry’s first material of choice before they realized it wasn’t resistant to wild swings in temperature and switched to silicon. The 60-year-old capacitors were almost surely fried at this point. On top of all that, it’s only an AM radio.

So the question was: what do I do with this thing? Should I spend hours poring over electrical diagrams, a hundred dollars for fiddly electronic parts, and even more time attempting to desolder and resolder scores of capacitors just to succeed and have a scratchy AM radio that only pulled in rambling religious sermons from Alabama? I think you might know the answer already.

I stumbled upon a YouTube video where a guy gutted an old AM radio and installed a $15 Bluetooth amplifier board on one side, using the knob to act as a stealth controller. This meant disassembling the unit, of course, which bothered the traditionalist in me, but I decided I had nothing to lose.

The electronics on the left side came out relatively easily once I’d cut a bunch of the wires, and I kept all of the stuff I pulled out. Assembling the bluetooth receiver, I bench-tested it and found it paired with my phone almost immediately. So I used some of the leftover metal bracing to bend a new cage for the receiver, widened a hole for the stalk, and mounted it back on the chassis in the empty spot, lined up with the stalk hole. Then I pulled the old stalk pot apart to get the brass rod itself, and machined one side down with a Dremel to fit into the slot on the receiver stalk. With that extra length, the knobs mounted on the front as they did from the factory. Cleaning the whole thing up with some 409 and 0000 steel wool, I made the chrome shine again. Finally, I ganged the power lead to the receiver up with the dial bulb so that the dial will light up when the receiver is turned on.

The only drawback I see is that it’s not very powerful. I’ve spent enough time in 60-year-old trucks to know that you need volume to overcome the road noise, and this unit won’t cut it. So if I want to use it, I’ll have to find an amp of some kind to go between the receiver and the speakers.

The one issue I’ve got is that the faceplate that came on the truck doesn’t fit this radio. The knobs are spaced a little too widely for the existing holes. I could use the faceplate from the green truck but that had a Deluxe dashboard and was covered in black vinyl from the factory. So I could remove that, clean up the faceplate and use it instead. And of course I can find other faceplates at Nationals this year as a longer-term solution.

Update: here are some photos of the cage I build from leftover parts. I widened out one of the existing holes with a Christmas tree bit to accept the stalk of the bluetooth receiver.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   5 Comments on Radio, Radio  |  Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Superbowl Preview

Sunday was a day of tying up some loose ends from the last couple of weeks in between snowstorms. We’re supposed to be getting a major accumulation this coming week so I wanted to get in under the cover, get some stuff buttoned up, and prep it for the weather.

First off, I drilled holes in the cupholder mount and the seat base and installed it with a couple of 5/16″ bolts. I’ve been waiting to do that for a long time, and it really looks good there—even in etching primer. I’m toying with the idea of taking it to be powder coated in black for some added durability.

I grabbed the bracket for the fuel filler hoses, pulled the fender off, and took some time to install it, the new hose, and a refurbed filler cap ring on the temporary fender. It all fit well, with the hose from the tank being maybe 1″ too short on the long side, but it’s good enough to reach the filler neck. So everything is ready for when the good fender gets sprayed and is ready to install permanently.

Then I used some zip ties and a wire holder to tidy up the fuse panel install from last weekend, moving the jumper wire up behind the heater plenum and directing the bundle from the panel upwards and out of the footwell. That made a big difference behind the pedals.

In the garage I fished out a sheet of 18 ga. steel, traced the pattern I built last weekend for the seat mount out, and cut it down with the angle grinder. When it was roughed out, I trimmed the sides down on the bench grinder and prepped it for the brake. I don’t know when I’ll get back out to Brian’s again but that will be another good project to dive into.

Finally, I wire wheeled the last three headliner bows and cleaned them up for etching primer. All five are now ready for a coat of the interior gray I used on the door cards, which will have to wait until springtime.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Superbowl Preview  |  Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Licensed Electrician

I had a windy, chilly Saturday to myself this weekend, and made the most of it in the time I had. There were several things on the punchlist I wanted to take care of, and I got a fair bit of them done.

First up, I pulled the Scout out and idled it in the driveway. While it warmed up, I pulled the old parts out of the back—the flywheel and clutch will go back to IHPA at some point for the core deposit, but I have to figure out how to get it to them. Just mailing the flywheel will cost more than a new car, so I think I’ll plan to meet them at Nats this year to do an exchange.

While that was warming up, I cleaned up the garage a bit to make things easier to walk around. It’s really getting crowded in there. When that was done, and after the space heater had taken the chill out, I sprayed a bunch of parts with etching primer to get them ready for paint, and looked through my bins for a couple of things to work on in the basement.

Then I lowered the tailgate on the Scout and spread the contents of my electrical box out to start work on the fuse panel. I’d already made a pigtail on the end of some 8 ga. wire for the battery side, and measured and cut down more to install an inline fuse next to the battery. I found a good place on the firewall to mount the fuse panel and snaked wire in through one of the grommets, then soldered connections to each of the leads from the relay. Looking over the electrical diagram for the truck I found that the heater box was on the accessory circuit, so I wired a lead to the back of the fuse panel and connected it to the relay. With the whole thing grounded, I temporarily hooked up a new 12-volt charging plug to one of the circuits in the fuse panel, connected the battery, and turned the key: Success! By this time the sun had gone down and the wind was blowing cold, so I cleaned up my mess and closed up the truck. But: Success! Now I’ve got the ability to add some more accessories to the truck.

Back in the warmth of the garage, I wire-wheeled two of the headliner bows to bare metal and sprayed them with etching primer. Then I pulled the driver’s seat base down from the attic and brought that inside with the original fuel pump from the truck and closed things up outside.

Down on the workbench, I set up a Hobo Freight spot weld cutter and started to disassemble the seat base. It’s more complicated than it looks, but came apart relatively easily (practicing on Darth’s cowl and both quarter panels of the Green truck gave me a lot of practice). The section I need is a triangular support that sticks out toward the rocker which looks like it would be a rectangle but is actually a parallelogram to match the slope of the floor both front to back and side to side. I took measurements of the seat base and started cutting up some cardboard, making a rough template with some painter’s tape. Then I cut a better version and set it up to lay flat so I’ll know how big a sheet of steel I’ll need to cut. This one is going to be a bitch to bend—tougher than the lockbox lids, because it’s a giant C-shape that won’t fold cleanly under Brian’s brake. I’m going to have to get creative with how I do this.

Finally, I soaked the fuel pump in oven cleaner and washed it off in the shop sink. It cleaned up well, but needs a rebuild kit. It’s an old-school Carter 3405 with an integrated filter in a second chamber; originally this would have come with a glass sight bowl, but the one I have is silver. If I have some extra time I’ll see about getting a rebuild kit and replacing it on the engine.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Licensed Electrician  |  Posted in Electrical, Seats, Travelall