This is the spare steering wheel Tony got me last fall, completely restored with 2-part epoxy, a layer of adhesion promoter, high-quality enamel, and a top coat of UV protectant. I’m really happy with how this turned out and I can’t wait to put it on the truck.
I’ve had a set of Scout II wing window replacement gaskets on my bench since 2023, right before I bought the Travelall. Given the current temperatures and my desire to stay warm, I dug them off the bottom of the pile and decided it was time to get them installed. The kits come with two gaskets and a small bag of parts—a bunch of tiny screws and two rubber caps for the front of the window. The new rubber is beefy and strong.
The first thing to do is break down the old windows. If you’re like me, you’ve got several spares, and between all of them there might be one in good shape. They are 40+ years old at this point and have been mounted in a vehicle with a suspension designed for a covered wagon, so they’ve been shaken to pieces and baked by the sun. I’ve got four spare frames for each side, with two complete passenger frames (good hinge, good frame, solid pivot, intact latch) and one for the driver’s side. The rest have an assortment of problems: a broken hinge, broken frame, broken pivot, missing latch, or a mix-‘n-match assortment of the above. I gathered up the best of each and broke them down on the bench, starting with a driver’s assembly. The spring-loaded pivot was broken in half—a common problem—so after I disassembled it completely I welded two sections of 18 ga. steel to either side of the pivot.
Back on the workbench I installed the rubber gasket based on the instructions on Anything Scout’s video. I found the rubber pretty easy to work with, and after about ten minutes I had it installed inside the channel and ready for the next step. I fed the window back down through the pivot, making sure the washers were in place correctly, and lined it up with the outside hinge. Putting that back in place involves a pair of pop rivets on the outside front face of the frame. I stalled out two years ago because I didn’t have a rivet gun, but borrowed one from Bennett to finish this job out. The instructions say to hold the hinge as close to the frame as possible when you install, which I did.
Then I used an allen key to put four of the tiny screws into the backside of the vertical of the frame.
Opening and closing the window, I found that the top of the window wasn’t aligning with the top of the frame; the top section leans backwards by about an eighth of an inch which makes the whole thing hard to close. I figured I would try rebuilding the other side to see if I could replicate the problem and found that the same thing happened on that side too, this time to an even worse degree. It’s an easy thing to drill the pop rivets back out, so I tried that, put new ones in and got the same results. Doing this with a third test window also resulted in misaligned glass.
At this point I had two options. I tried using a wide-jawed pair of vice grips to get a solid hold on the outer bend of the hinge to try to move it outward in order to widen the gap at the top of the glass. This didn’t work; I couldn’t get enough purchase on the frame without bending the rivets to move the metal of the hinge. The next option is to buy a shoulder rivet kit from the original rubber supplier, pull both of the untouched windows out of the truck, drill the pin out of the hinges, swap the new rubber in place, and rebuild with new rivets.
My next step will be to break the spare driver’s window frame back down because the latch on the window is broken, and replacements are $100. The only good window/latch assembly I have for the driver’s side is actually on the truck, and that frame is broken at the pivot point, so it needs repairing in any case. So I’m really no further along than I was when I started.
I’ve embarked on a project to digitize all of of my old paper files after I found out that the big multifunction copiers at work are back online and are able to email again. They have batch scanners that will take a giant stack of papers and smash them into one PDF that I can then email myself. Going through my overstuffed file cabinet I found a long-lost folder of Scout documents. It’s all Chewbacca era stuff, including the original lineset ticket, most of the receipts for the registration, an April 1972 copy of Mechanix Illustrated with a review of the new Scout II, and a bunch of other assorted papers. I was happy to find pictures that I thought I’d lost as well as correspondence from the original owner I bought it from in 1997. I’ll start posting them here as I process all the files.
This is the original listing for Chewbacca from a nice man up in Lancaster, PA. I bought this truck the day before my birthday in 1998.
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:
While it may look from the outside like I go into every workday with a plan, the truth is that I rarely do unless I’ve got a clear plan mapped out. In the cases where there is no plan, I often spend the day bouncing from one small project to another letting my ADD get the better of me. So in the spirit of using this page both as a place to record what I’ve already done and keep a list of things I intend to do, here’s another list.
One of my main goals is to unstick the clutch in the driveway. The inspection cover is still off, and I’ve been squirting PBblaster between the flywheel and clutch disc every day, but I suspect I’ve got to do a couple of things to really make a difference:
I’ve got to pick up some new fuel filters and exchange my long battery cable for a shorter one first, so a trip to the auto parts store is the first order of business.
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:
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:
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.
I’ve had this browser tab open for a while, so I’m going to post it here: The Drive did a good article on the basics of adjusting a carburetor.