{"id":5772,"date":"2026-03-26T08:35:30","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T16:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/?p=5772"},"modified":"2026-03-27T09:10:31","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T17:10:31","slug":"new-friends-and-priorities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/2026\/03\/26\/new-friends-and-priorities\/","title":{"rendered":"New Friends and Priorities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had a very nice fellow contact me through the YouTube channel when he spied <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/JRzD67AJ9xM?si=esCCmB848sdFZ4fY&amp;t=1735\">the tailgate from the Green Travelall in the background of a recent video<\/a>, asking if it&#8217;s still available. We traded a few emails and then talked via phone on Saturday morning. He&#8217;s got a Travelall of his own, and it&#8217;s been sitting for a while, but he said my videos have gotten him inspired to pick things back up again. He&#8217;s based in Michigan but drives east quite often, so we&#8217;re going to try to meet up somewhere to make a deal. It&#8217;s always cool to hear from people who like the videos (sometimes it feels like I&#8217;m doing them for myself only) and I&#8217;m happy that my low-key self promotion has yielded new friendships.<\/p>\n<p>As I do in the middle of each week, I&#8217;m going to make a list of stuff to tackle next:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The first and most important job is going to be sorting out the brakes on the Travelall. I want to solve <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=7skdz5c_G-U\">the sticky brake issue<\/a> once and for all so I can drive the damn thing long-distance without fear. So the order of diagnosis will be to pull the drums off, starting with the driver&#8217;s front, and:\n<ol>\n<li>Back the adjusters way off so that they&#8217;re not so grabby.<\/li>\n<li>Check each of the cylinders to make sure they&#8217;re moving both directions freely and not leaking.<\/li>\n<li>Bleed the system again.<\/li>\n<li>If all else fails, I&#8217;ll replace the long line going from the prop valve back to the rear axle, which is the only one that hasn&#8217;t been touched.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>Then I&#8217;m going to pull out the buffing wheel and run it with some cutting compound on the hood to see if I can add a little sparkle to some of the remaining paint, as well as pull off some of the peeling clearcoat. That might church up the truck a little bit.<\/li>\n<li>Check the wire to the fuel tank sender and see if it&#8217;s still connected. I&#8217;d like to have my fuel gauge working again.<\/li>\n<li>While I&#8217;m behind the dashboard, I&#8217;ve got to ground the light on the right side of the panel, and add some light-blocking material around the edges of the panel.<\/li>\n<li>Wire the electric fuel pump in to the ignition circuit more permanently. Right now it&#8217;s running off alligator clips, which is janky.<\/li>\n<li><del datetime=\"2026-03-27T17:09:21+00:00\">Sort out the vacuum lines on the 800.<\/del> They are currently all over the place and disconnected in a way that makes no sense to me, and I suspect this is the reason the truck is dying on acceleration\u2014much like the Travelall did before I hooked the main vacuum line back up to the carb. Unfortunately, I don&#8217;t have a Scout 800 service manual and 3 of the 4 service manuals I do have don&#8217;t cover the 196 engine at all, while the fourth only briefly talks about the carburetor and provides no vacuum line diagram. \u00a0The interwebs have been no help so far either, but a deeper search is in progress.\n<ul>\n<li>I fooled around with this Thursday evening: There were two hoses in question teeing off the side of the manifold. The first was a narrow black hose that was just long enough to reach the vacuum advance port on the distributor. I put a fitting together from my spares and connected it back up, and we&#8217;ll see if that helps any. The second was a larger red hose that led to the PCV on the valve cover, which I&#8217;d removed to get the cover off. With this hose plugged the engine wanted to die, but I figure I&#8217;ve got to adjust the timing with it connected to get the engine running properly, so I hooked it back up for now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Wire the electric fuel pump up with an inline fuse to the ignition circuit on the 800 as well. I don&#8217;t see mysef springing for a mechanical pump anytime soon\u2014and a rebuild kit for the one I have is three times the cost of a new one\u2014so the electric pump will do for now.<\/li>\n<li>Pick up another tube of TankWeld and keep chasing the leaks on the fuel tank down. I&#8217;ve got the major holes filled but I&#8217;m finding new pinholes here and there.<\/li>\n<li>Stop out at Brian&#8217;s place to run up Peer Pressure, drop off my generator for him to look over, and grab my spare PCV valve and tow straps from the truck.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m hoping to get the Travelall sorted out so that I can drive her across the bridge to Brian&#8217;s place next week for some EV work, but that&#8217;s going to take a series of 5-10-50 trips locally to shake out the bugs. Alternately, I&#8217;ll ferry the OG-V over to swap it for the Scout, weather permitting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Total Scout 800 costs to date:<\/strong><\/p>\n<div class=\"google-table-cont\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/spreadsheets\/d\/e\/2PACX-1vSb6ubnaWdFCvt90bRUFWtQnDnS40XyNkxaNgEdR2SF5xKCk0THoOutuDgjR9maOXGP63sloi6FMGom\/pubhtml?gid=0&amp;single=true&amp;widget=true&amp;headers=false\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had a very nice fellow contact me through the YouTube channel when he spied the tailgate from the Green Travelall in the background of a recent video, asking if it&#8217;s still available. We traded a few emails and then talked via phone on Saturday morning. He&#8217;s got a Travelall of his own, and it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scout-800","category-travelall"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Ac2-1v6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5772"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5783,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772\/revisions\/5783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}