I stumbled upon an article on the Spartacus Educational website this morning about the JFK assassination and realized I was looking at the deepest of rabbit holes—a better organized rabbit hole than that of Wikipedia—which is saying something. There’s a ton of stuff to dig into there, on a site whose design dates back to about 2002, which is oddly comforting.
I get infrequent updates from the Maryland 529 Plan about Finn’s college fund, usually in the form of an email that contains a link to a “secure” PDF I have to download to read. I’m still puzzling over this farkakte security strategy; the school district does the same thing. It’s sort of like hitching a team of oxen up to your car to drive out to the store. Anyway, there has been a bunch of controversy over the earnings rate of Prepaid Trust accounts, which is what we set up for Finn. Somehow the administration of the accounts got all fucked up and they’re in the middle of sorting that mess out, and have predictably been doing an abysmal job of communicating about it, going so far as to re-hiring the guy who oversaw the train wreck to continue overseeing it. The message I got yesterday from the state treasurer was attached to a 40-page document outlining the beginnings of the program, a timeline of issues, decisions, and events that led up to the current situation, and a not-so-intuitive explanation of what they’re doing moving forward. I’m still processing all the information to try and make an informed decision as to what we’ll do with Finn’s account (keep it in the Prepaid plan, or roll it over into a standard 529 plan), and I requested a manual calculation of our current balance with interest based on this new number.
The Maryland 529 plan seems to still be in turmoil; apparently they did some miscalculating and are claiming that some people have too much money in their accounts.
Maryland 529 told families two years ago they would earn 6 percent on balances held before Oct. 31, 2021, because of excess earnings from the trust. But the agency said it erroneously applied the formula in a way that inflated the values of accounts between November 2021 and April 2022.
There isn’t a whole lot of information coming from the Plan, which has made some lawmakers very upset.
A spokesperson for the AG’s office said it was “currently advising the 529 plan in addressing the challenges they are facing.” State auditors were already set to examine whether the agency had addressed management problems raised in a 2019 report, and said the latest calculation issue would also be part of the review.
Fucking fantastic. We have a chunk of savings set aside for Finn’s education in something called the Maryland Prepaid College Trust. It’s a vehicle that lets us lock tuition costs in at the time of contribution, with the state basically assuming any risk of inflation. Sounds good, right?
Turns out there’s been some shenanigans with the system, and a bunch of people haven’t been able to access their funds:
According to the Maryland Prepaid College Trust, trouble in the prepaid plan surfaced shortly after the trust transitioned program management from an in-house team to a third-party vendor, Intuition College Savings Solutions, in November 2021.
They held a board meeting that went extremely poorly last night, where they were required by law to tell the public and let us attend, but basically called roll and then went into a closed session without providing any update. They’ve been evasive and shitty about this for months, apparently, and this erodes all of the trust I have in the program. I had to look at our account two weeks ago for something unrelated, and all of the money we invested was there at that point, but fuck’s sake, this is scary. That money is a sizeable investment for our family. If it were to disappear for some reason, that would set us back years.
Hey! It’s not often I get to write about our little state being on the front lines of solid legislation, but here’s an example: Two bills were passed by the state over the weekend that limit companies’ ability to collect data on our kids, and the other limits their ability to get kids to spend more time online through dark patterns (autoplay, time-based awards, or spam). Lobbyists for big tech, of course, are unhappy:
“The bill’s goal is laudable…but its chosen means are unconstitutional by imposing prior restraints on online speech, erecting barriers to sharing and receiving constitutionally-protected speech…”
Big tech always trots out the First Amendment to paper over their predatory behavior; it always pegs the bullshit meter.
I’m anxious to diagnose the issue with the Scout, because I want to know what ‘s wrong but also because I want to drive her. I went out after dinner Monday night to check the timing to see if it was advanced or retarded, which could be the cause of my mystery sound. I had an old yard sale Sears timing gun that I hooked up to the battery and #8 wire (Scouts use the #8 wire instead of the more commonly used #1 wire on most GM/Ford products) but I got no light from the gun at all. On the bench I broke it down to reveal old capacitors and components that had probably fizzled out during the first Bush administration, so I hit the Harbor Freight for a new unit.
Back under the hood I cleaned off the timing marks and chalked the pulley. When I set the gun to 0˚ and ran it, the chalk hit at about the 15˚ mark—but I hadn’t run the engine or disconnected the vacuum advance yet, which meant the reading wasn’t entirely correct. It was getting dark by this point so I shut her down and put her back in the garage to avoid the rain forecast for the evening.
Thursday evening I went back outside to give it a second go; this time I was able to plug off the vacuum advance and get things ready for a proper diagnosis. While I was getting a wrench on the hold-down bolt, I was holding the distributor body and it spun under my hand with a little bit of pressure—which told me it wasn’t tight for a while. When I put the gun on it, the chalk showed up at about 15˚advanced, so I spun it back to 5˚ and listened to the idle settle down.
Tightening that off, I noticed some smoke coming off the manifold on the passenger side, which makes me wonder if there’s a leak between the manifold and the block. I’ve been smelling something from the engine for a while, and I wonder if that could be the culprit—it would certainly explain the additional noise.
Meanwhile, my oil sample is safely in the hands of Blackstone as per the USPS’s tracking service. Going on past experience, it’ll take 2 weeks or so to hear back from them on what the oil can tell us. I’ve got a new Fuel-Pro gasket sitting behind my desk for the next major step: dropping the pan to see if there are any chunky bits at the bottom.
While I had the timing gun out, I figured I’d throw it on the Travelall for giggles to see what the timing looked like there. I’d solved the high idle issue I had before by re-connecting the PCV valve on the back of the valley pan, but because I’d cranked all of the idle screws in all the way, I had to spin them back out. The engine is running sloppily now, loping around like it’s not firing correctly, and the exhaust is abhorrent—the girls flipped out because it quickly filled the house. I’ve got to get this thing mobile quickly so I can move it away from the windows to properly work on it. In any case I couldn’t get a good enough look at the chalk before I was forced to shut her down. New PCV valves from that era are hard to find, but I think a new one will help out immensely.
While I was digging around in my parts bins I pulled the two mirrors out and mocked them up on the side of the truck. They look great! I’ve got to go back through my reference photos from Nats and see how other owners mounted the top mounts to their doors; I’ve got a very small vertical area to work with and I’d prefer not to mess up the mounting surface for the weatherstripping, which may be my only option.
At the bottom the two holes pre-drilled for the old mount aren’t wide enough for this setup; I can easily drill a new hole and add a backing nut inside the door. I think what I might do is (with my new fancy welder) cut a small thin plate, weld two shallow bolts to that, drill holes through the door, and feed the bolts through the holes so it’s as flat as possible.
Another thing I noticed was that there are three dimples in the passenger side windshield frame for where a sun visor would have been mounted; I think this thing was as stripped-down as possible when it left the factory.
I’m talking to a guy from the Binder Planet who offered up a rear Travelall seat back in February, and who has some other assorted barn door parts left from a project. He’s able to meet in Rhode Island, so I think my plan is to rent a pickup and drive up there over a weekend, stay the night somewhere local, pick up the parts, and drive back the following day. If I time it right I might detour up to Mahopac to say hi to some high school friends on my way back home.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I made progress on the Travelall on Sunday afternoon after I’d knocked out a bunch of other tasks around the house. I’m still working on the inoperable brake and clutch system, so I started by disconnecting the hard lines to the master cylinder and rigging up a bench bleed system so that I could test it out. The system primed itself quickly, and after I knew it was working I had to fight the hard lines to get them reconnected to the cylinder. When that was done, I jumped back in the truck and tried both pedals. Amazingly, the brake pedal now had lots of resistance, but I still wasn’t getting anything out of the clutch pedal.
Leaving the brakes for the time being, I tried multiple methods for bleeding the clutch cylinder with no success. In the middle of all of this, I jumped in the Scout to move it up the driveway and mistakenly drove over the brake fluid bottle, sending brake fluid all over the driveway and on the back of the Accord. I had to spend the next hour and half hosing off the driveway and washing the car to make sure brake fluid didn’t eat away at the paint or asphalt. That sucked.
Monday afternoon I rallied after spending a nice aimless morning sitting on the couch and fighting off the urge to take a nap. I re-read the bleed directions for the slave cylinder, then went out and got it set up for a two-person operation. With Jen’s help on the clutch pedal I was able to bleed all of the air out of the line and the cylinder into a catch bottle, then buttoned everything up in the expectation that I’d be able to put it in gear.
Unfortunately, all I could do was grind gears. There’s a chance the clutch rod isn’t adjusted long enough to throw out the clutch all the way, but beyond that I’m pretty stumped. I’m going to run through some more diagnostics now that the pedal actually works, and see what I can find.
I also attempted to bring the idle mixture down on the carb, with no success. She really wants to idle high for some reason; both screws are pretty much all the way in the bore of the carb, and I brought the curb idle screw in a bunch as well. Spraying starting fluid around the base of the carb revealed no vacuum leaks, and every hose coming off the carb or manifold is either connected or plugged. So I’ve got to sort that out as well. The challenge moving forward is that the weather, which has been remarkably mild and friendly through the first half of June, is about to turn wet and rainy, and I might not be able to do much with this forecast.
Moving to the Scout, a lot of the advice I’m reading on the Binder Planet has me confused; there are some saying my symptoms point to actual rod knock and some that don’t. I only hear it when I get on the gas, so I’m unclear as to whether or not this is knock or could be something to do with the timing or possibly a water pump going bad. The other thought is that the heat riser valve itself is bad, or there’s another exhaust leak somewhere else. I’ve got a cheap Harbor Freight stethoscope so I’m going to pull a tire today and take a listen to see if I can hear anything with that at idle. Then I’ll dig my timing light out of the box and check the timing itself to see where that stands; if it’s retarded or advanced I’ll bring it back to zero and see if that helps. Then I’ll try the next non-invasive diagnosis—one of the accessories going bad, or a hidden exhaust leak.
The next step will be to take the Straight Steer bar off, drain the new oil and drop the oil pan itself to see if there’s any metal at the bottom—if there is indeed a bad bearing or worn cam lobe, something solid should show up at the bottom of the pan; if there is and it doesn’t stick to a magnet it’ll be bearings.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Knowing I wasn’t going to be able to drive Peer Pressure to Ohio this year without diagnosing the engine noise, I got the oil and coolant changed in the CR-V, strapped the pod on the roof, and moved a bunch of my tools and kit from the Scout, along with a couple of parts to possibly trade or sell. I spent a lot of time leading up to our trip moping about not driving an IH to an IH event, but eventually I got past myself and remembered to be excited to get away and see friends. Thursday morning Bennett met me at 9AM, we loaded up our gear, and hit the road for Springfield. The show was in a new location this year: they moved it from the Waco airfield to the Navistar assembly plant, which was the facility where my Travelall was built in 1963. This meant our hotel was new and also a half an hour from the show. We made good time through the smoke from the Canadian forest fires and rolled in to the hotel by late afternoon, meeting a bunch of folks we knew out in the parking lot after checkin and dinner. It was a bit quiet, as a lot of people hadn’t shown up yet, but we enjoyed the cool night air and had some beers to relax.
In the morning we got breakfast and hit the road early to hit the parts stands. Stuff for C-Series trucks is a lot thinner on the ground than Scout parts, so I knew I had to be quick and smart about what I was looking for. I came prepared with a list and basic price ranges I’d gathered by averaging numbers from the Internet, so I knew what the high end would be on most things.
I immediately found a somewhat foggy C-series wing window and got that for $10, then moved to the stand next door and found a right and a left side with much better glass (and no rubber) for $10 apiece. Those went immediately into the car. At the same vendor we found a Scout II console lid in the same color as a console I’d brought, which was sitting in the car. I brought it back over and made a fair swap deal with the guy for a beautiful 14″ International emblem for the right side barn door in perfect shape.
On the far side there was a guy with three trailers full of parts; he had a C-series bench seat from a pickup that looked reasonably intact minus the pipe base it sat on. I made a mental note to go over and wheel a deal with him on Saturday afternoon. At another vendor I found a bin full of front marker buckets that were solid, had been blasted and painted, and had intact pigtails. Those were each $10, well worth the price. I found a set of NOS lenses on another table for $300; apparently those are a little more expensive. I put them back and kept walking.
When Dan Hayes pulled in we checked out his table, and I found a beautiful Travelall script badge mounted on foam and grabbed it. He also had two ’64-’65 grilles in much better shape than the one I’ve currently got, and the price was extremely reasonable. I filed that away for Saturday, trying to maximise the money I’d brought.
We met up with our friend Jeff on the grounds and walked over to his truck where he had two beautiful IH-branded west coast mirrors waiting for me; I gratefully gave him what he was asking for them. There were several other C-series trucks and a Travelall with the exact same mirrors mounted at the show, so I took multiple pictures of them for reference. They went directly into the car and got wrapped in a blanket.
I had to spend a bit of time inside at the tech talks to cool off—this show area was set up on pavement, not the forgiving grass of the airfield, so we were getting cooked even though it was relatively cool with a breeze. I was wearing Merrel hiking boots with a thick heel and I could still feel the heat on the soles of my feet. They’d scheduled some excellent speakers and I learned a lot while I relaxed in the shade.
Later in the day a few more sellers came in and set up shop, and I found a guy who had a bunch of C-series stuff on a desk for excellent prices. I got a set of beat-up C-series visors for $10, a spare rear taillight lens for $5, and a set of C1100 badges for $20. We got to talking and he walked out to show me an immaculate D-series pickup truck which he’d just finished restoring. I voted him for best pickup and best paint, which he should easily win.
Out in the field we ran into the Delaware-based guy who bought my windshield frame; he just opened up his shop two years ago and is working mostly in Scouts now. The show truck he brought was very pretty, and it was nice talking to him, but it’s clear I’m way out of his demographic: he built an LS swap with a lift and fancy tires. He’s going for the high-end restomod audience, which is where the big money is. We wished him luck and went on our way.
By about 4:30 we were pretty crispy so we packed up our stuff and grabbed Steven to go get some food at a brewpub near our hotel. After refueling and enjoying some cool air and a cold beer, we headed back to the hotel and met up with friends in the parking lot amongst the Scouts there. I struck up a conversation with Steve, the owner of the SSII registry, and learned some new things. I talked with guys from Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona, and some old heads I recognized from the IHC Digest back in the day. By about 11PM we all were winding down, and we headed upstairs to cool off and get some sleep.
Saturday morning we got to the grounds by about 9:30 and headed back out into the parts field for some more picking. A few more vendors appeared but Howie never showed—he’s always got badges and small parts that are impossible to find, and I figured he would be my best bet for the Travelall-specific stuff I wanted. I was happy to have scored the stuff I did find on Friday in his absence.
Returning through the stands, I came upon a pair of taillight lenses for $10, two chrome washer surrounds for $20, and a single front turn lens for $1. We took in a couple of the tech talks in the early afternoon: there was a great talk on IH electronics and how to upgrade the systems wisely, what tools to buy/use, and how to diagnose some common problems. After that the guys from Anything Scout talked about their recent journey to Baja to race in the NORRA 1000 with a Scout they pulled from a storage yard 9 months ago, which was fascinating.
I stopped by the IHPA booth to see if they had my bench or the air cleaner they’d promised to bring for me, but they were very apologetic and told me the week had gotten past them, and promised to make it right the following week.
We did our judging (we were both registered participants without a truck) and caught up with friends and basically had a great time walking the grounds. There were a lot more fancy Scouts there this year—all the old guard see the change in the air—but there were still plenty of beaters to be found among the trailer queens. Much of the discussion each day centered around how rare trucks are getting, how expensive they are, and how many are being bought up by the restorers and flippers. I met a couple of attendees who were walking around asking if anyone knew of a truck for sale; two guys from Wisconsin told me they were willing to drive to Pennsylvania to get a truck. That certainly shocked me, as I figured there was more rolling stock where they were from than what’s left out here.
I was sad not to have Peer Pressure because there were two very purple Scouts there this year: an 800 in a bright shade that would stop a train and a Scout II that was hand-painted with a roller during a manic episode. That one spent a lot of time in the parking lot on Saturday night surrounded by people trying to get it to run right again; it made the drive from Pennsylvania somehow but crapped out between the hotel and the show.
In the afternoon I walked back over to Dan’s stand and put the money down for the grille, figuring I’d never see one that good again. Bennett made some more deals (He was a lot more restrained than I was) and I found a C-series headlight bucket for $5. We did another circuit of the grounds, dropped the last of our raffle tickets off, and headed out for some Mexican food near the hotel.
Back in the parking lot they were setting up for the raffle, so we found a great spot up by the front and pretended our Honda was a Scout. As usual, I didn’t win any of the raffle items (it’s the only way I’d own a Redcat RC Scout) and was quickly bid out of the other things I was interested in, but it was fun to watch the show. We helped clean things up and hung out for a few more hours talking with friends until everyone called it a night at about 11:30.
Sunday morning we grabbed some breakfast with Carl and Mary, said our goodbyes, and hit the road for Super Scout Specialists, which was on our way home. They opened the shop at 9, and we pulled in a little after 10. Walking around in there is always amazing; the front of the shop is a museum of IH trucks and the back is just stuffed with new and used parts. Bennett and I found ourselves in the back racks looking at used stuff and noticed the door to the parts yard was open. We walked outside in a light drizzle and surveyed the lot of carcasses; Bennett pointed out two Travelalls in back and I made a beeline for them.
They had both been picked over hard and showed signs of being out in the elements for years, but one of the two had, by some miracle, an intact sheet of rear passenger glass. I asked inside if they could give me a price, and they were surprised when we told them there was still glass in it. When he gave me a number my jaw about hit the floor and I told him I’d take it on the spot.
We grabbed a few utility knives and commenced to carefully cutting it out of the truck, covering our hands with some kind of black sealant, and in about ten minutes it fell backwards into Bennett’s waiting hands (he volunteered to climb into the filthy cab) and he handed it gently back out to us. I carried it carefully out to the CR-V, gave Rob the cash, and tried to contain my excitement. Finding exactly what I needed was always a longshot, but somehow I won the ticket.
At this point it was really raining and a lot of the people from the show were stopping in to browse. After talking with the guys for a while, we hit the road at about noon and hustled our way east in the middle of an advancing rainstorm. As the rain kicking up off the road reduced our visibility, I was super glad not to be in the Scout; the wipers wouldn’t have kept up with the water and we would have been soaking wet. And having a working defogger was key. By the time we got into Pennsylvania the water had tapered off and when we turned south for Maryland we headed out of its path completely.
Somewhere above Frederick, we spotted a flatbed with two Scouts pulled off to the side of the road and immediately pulled over to stop. The Scout hanging off the stinger had lost a wheel and was dragging the drum on the ground. I didn’t remember the trucks from the show, but figured maybe someone had made a deal somewhere. We talked to the driver, who was hauling them back from northern PA for a guy we know locally; it just happened that we passed him on the way home. Small world.
With stops, we made it back to my driveway by 7:30, swapped Bennett’s gear into his car, and shook hands on another great Nationals trip. Traveling with him is always fun, and he knows everyone, so it’s always great to be introduced to new people.
Again, in retrospect, I’m glad we didn’t bring the Scout this year, as both the weather and our cargo would have made the drive back a challenge. I would have had to fabricate a box or crate to store the glass in to protect it from the harsh ride the Scout provides, and we were already behind schedule as it was. We had a dry, comfortable cruiser with A/C and good mileage, and that made up for a lot. I like to think everything happens for a reason, and once again my IH friends and my luck came through.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I put a picture up on Instagram of the Traveall T-shirt I designed and printed through a vendor promo a few months ago, and it wound up being pretty popular. Through that post a guy asked about the ’64-’65 grille I originally bought for the truck that I can’t use, and we DM’d back and forth. Turns out he’s got a ’65 and needs a grille; I sold it to him for exactly what I paid, which is pretty awesome! I pulled it down from the garage attic, still in the box it came to me in, and sent it on its way Thursday.
Other than that, I haven’t gotten any bites from my post on the Binder Planet, so I’m going to experiment with Marketplace and see what kind of response I get for items like the Scout II windshield.
I was able to make a Tuesday early-morning run up to the recycling center to dump the first jug of used-to-be gas from the truck, which went smoothly. When I got back I drained the last of the fluid out for a total of about eight gallons, and some small flakes came out with the remainder, which is a pretty good sign—if it turned to soup or filled the pan with oatmeal, I’d be very worried. I’m going to buy some good gas and run it through the tank to see if any more yuck comes out, and if not, I’ll just leave the tank in place. (I really don’t want to have to drop it if at all possible). I do know that the outlet hose is clogged with a wasp nest so I have to pull the wheel off and figure out if I can get around/behind the tank to replace it.
I’ve got the bodywork on the passenger side endcap pretty much complete; I sprayed it with rattle-can IH red for the time being. It’s good enough for government pay, and I’m going to move on to other sections.
Theoretically I should have a wheel showing up to the house momentarily, and when that arrives I can bring it and our flat CR-V wheel to the NTB in town to have new rubber mounted. I’m on the fence as to what color to paint the wheels, but I think I’m leaning towards black. Depending on how good this one looks I might paint it before the tire goes on.
I got a box in the mail on Wednesday with the paint I ordered a month ago, which is good news. Now the big thing will be setting up for and actually shooting the paint. What I’m going to have to do is put up my 20-year-old car tent in the driveway, find a way to block out the sides, and put something down on the ground to avoid painting the driveway. Then the roof needs to be blocksanded, degreased, primed at least once, blocksanded again, and then shot with a coat of IH red. From there I can see how it lays down and if it needs a second coat, as well as whether it matches with the rattle-can red I’ve been using over the bondo patches.
On Thursday evening, after a long day behind the keyboard, I went out to the truck and put my experience chipping rubberized floorcoating out of a schoolbus to work.
While the coating came up, the paper-based adhesive was still stuck to the wood, so I went back to a trick I used to clean the floors up in our kitchen years ago. I have a hand planer I used to remove the tarpaper adhesive under old linoleum. It had tried to eat its own cord at the end of a job a couple of years ago, so I cut and spliced the cord and then put it to work slowly grinding out the paper. It’s still very sticky so it gummed up the unit and required a lot of cleaning, so I only cleared out about half of it before the setting sun made things too dark.
By now you’re wondering why I don’t just cut this wood out of the truck and replace it; at this point I’m considering it strongly. Part of this exercise was to see how difficult it would be to remove the existing wood, which meant I had to expose all the bolts. If I’m doing my math correctly there are about 60 chonky countersunk Phillips-head bolts holding the wood in place. I think I’m going to leave this as is for now until I get the truck mobile, and then I can pull the wood out, spend time scraping and coating the frame from inside—not underneath—and then replace the wood.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
On Monday I went out to continue sanding and skimming areas of the truck to get them ready for paint. The passenger side tailcap is coming along well, but will need a lot of attention to be clean enough to go to paint—but I’m enjoying the sculptural aspect of working with filler to get things smooth.
Recapping the starting issue, we’ve replaced almost everything in the ignition system besides the core distributor, but the points I originally bought didn’t have an integrated condenser so we tried to hotwire it on the workday. Testing for spark, we never got anything at the plugs. I replaced the points in the original distributor with a new set with an integrated condenser, and found an early picture I’d taken of the unit as it came to know how to wire things back up (see that black wire in the lower center of the picture above?). After I wired the second new set of points in as per the original and tested my testing light on the Scout, I hooked it up to the Travelall and then I had spark! Unfortunately I couldn’t get her to light off. So I pulled the carburetor off to tear it down and clean it out; I figured the accelerator pump seals were dry and the float was probably stuck.
I also started tracing wires under the dash and pulled the radio plate off to expose everything underneath; while I was there I pulled the old head unit and two dry-rotted speakers they’d bolted under the dash out and threw them in the trash to make more room. The way this dash is designed it could be much simpler to pull wires (or maybe even replace the loom ) than it is in the Scout, but I’m still trying to make a plan for how I’m going to get this thing wired up correctly.
Wednesday evening I was out sanding the truck and a guy on a big Harley parked at the end of the driveway; he’s a fellow car guy and stopped by to check out the truck. This marks the fourth person who has stopped in since I parked the truck in the driveway; clearly people have noticed.
As of Thursday morning the carb was partially disassembled and sort of half-soaking in carb cleaner, but I couldn’t get the float bowl or metering block off the side of the horn. I found a wider container to put the assembly in so that the affected sections were submerged, and was finally able to get all the sections apart on Friday morning. The paper gaskets had glued themselves to the metal so I had to carefully scrape everything apart to get it cleaned up—but the inside of the carb was very clean.
And on Friday I got two boxes of goodies: the new distributor showed up as well as some fuel hose, hose clamps, and a proper oil filter. So if we can’t make the old distributor work, the new one should be ready to pop in (minus a set of male-to-female plug wires).
Farting around with an old Scout II hubcap Friday night, I put it on the odd 15″ rim, where it fit well. Suddenly, a light bulb went off in my head and I realized that a 16″ tire won’t fit on a 15″ rim (duh Bill) so I’d have to source a rim for the fourth tire I just bought. It so happens a guy near here is selling an entire front axle assembly with wheels included, so I messaged him to see if he’d be willing to sell me the wheels (providing they’re the correct size).
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.