Influencers have, unsurprisingly, bought into the trend; scroll through the #roadtrippin or #campvibes hashtags and you’ll come across images of International Scouts in meadows or at the edges of cliffs. This is the new life of the old truck—still a workhorse, after a fashion, but instead of manual labor the work is content creation.
The New Yorker reports on the exploding market for antique SUVs and trucks—here in Austin, but indicative of trends nationwide.
I got a text from our old friend Brian H. asking for a little help jockeying cars around in his new garage, and pleased to hear from him, set something up for Saturday morning. He and his wife bought a house out in the country with multiple garages and a lot more space, and he’s picked up a couple of new projects to play with as well as helping Bennett store some of his fleet.
After walking the dog, I warmed up the Scout in the driveway, looking nervously at the overcast sky. The weather report did not call for rain until late that evening so I waited for the defroster to blow condensation off the windows and set out on the road. Brian’s new spread is in a still-rural part of Ellicott City, and his house is tucked in between a horse farm and a stand of woods. I passed Heavy D (Bennett’s truck) in the driveway and parked down by a three-bay garage where the two of them stood talking. We stood around and caught up for an hour or so—it’s been several years since I’ve seen Brian—and then I got the tour of the barns. He’s got an incredible setup; lots of room, lots of excellent tools the homeowner left behind, and tons of possibilities.
Bennett took me out for a ride in his Speedster while the sky was still clear, and we got it out on Rt. 40 to hear the engine wind up. It’s a really nice little car. It’s a replica that was made professionally about 30 years ago, and since buying it he replaced the original engine with a bigger unit built by a VW race specialist. It’s been sitting for a long while so he’s got some work to do getting the carburetors to run correctly, and the brakes need to be gone through front and rear. The gel coat is dull so the red doesn’t shine as much as he’d like, but now that he’s got a warm dry space to store it, he’s planning on buffing out the color and making it shine again. It’s a fucking blast to drive in, and larger on the inside than it looks. However, on our way home the carbs flooded so we sat in a field waiting for them to drain, and limped home on what sounded like three cylinders.
From there we looked over the main barn where Brian has his Edsel stored on rollaway carts and his Dad’s old Dodge D-100 in a state of disassembly waiting on some love. The day’s mission was to pull the box off the Dodge and store it in the back of the pole barn, then move the Edsel around to the back so that there’s more room up front for Heavy D to sit next to the Dodge. After a little consultation we got the box up and over on to some sawhorses, and the Edsel slid around back, easy as pie. He’s put the Edsel on hold while he gets the Dodge closer to running, and he’s got his hands full there. The Edsel has a fresh new engine installed and ready to go, and he’s made progress with the body, but there’s a lot more to accomplish.
Meanwhile, his house needs work along with all of those projects, so he’s got his hands full! He took us on a tour of the main floor, which was completely remodeled before the purchase, and then the basement, which holds almost as many horrors as ours did when we bought it. We sat and ate some pizza and caught up some more, and it was great to just hang out and be with friends for the day.
Along about 2:30 Bennett and I got ready to head out, and Brian sent me home with the smaller of the two blasting cabinets he inherited with the house—a beautiful Eastwood side-loading unit with a light and vacuum port on the back.
I got home at about 3 and did some work around the house before getting a shower and dressed up for our Saturday advent activity: seeing the Cirque Nutcracker at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. We drove in to the city and got to the BSO an hour ahead of time, which allowed us to relax with a drink before the show and people watch. Our seats were high on the fourth level but we could see everything and the sound was perfect. The production is incredible, featuring acrobats, jugglers and aerialists, and we were all captivated through the whole thing. It was lovely to get dressed up with my ladies and feel fancy for an evening after two years of living in socks and pajamas. As the lights went up after intermission and the first performers came back out, I reflected on just how lucky I am to have great friends and a beautiful family, and how much I’ve enjoyed the leadup to this holiday season.
It’s getting to the slow period of the year for fooling around with the Scout, so I’ve been trying to line up a couple of inside projects to work on while Peer Pressure snoozes in the garage. There have been several parts trucks I’ve visited this year where I’ve looked for two main assemblies to grab: the steering column and the heater box. I got a good example of the former and struck out on the latter.
At this point I’ve got the spare steering column on the bench, broken down past the turn signal assembly. That part is sitting on my desk waiting for me to order a replacement. There are two types, one that works for columns from ’71-’77 and another from ’77-’80. The plan is to buy the proper replacement, re-assemble the whole column, then pull it back apart to make sure I know the process back and forth. Then I’ll gather my courage and pull the real wheel on PP down to replace the assembly properly.
Next, I’d like to find a heater box worth refurbishing. The idea here is to pull the whole thing apart, replace the core unit and motor, strip and spray the box, and reassemble it properly. Then in the springtime I can swap that into place. Maybe I can trade Brendan a decent folding Scout 80 windshield for one. Or, I’ve got two of these in the basement—there’s $150 right there.
Some other ideas for inside projects:
- Pull the air cleaner off, strip it down to the bare metal, and repaint the whole thing. I think Mike Moore has the proper V8 stickers available to spruce it up…
- Drill and tap my shiny new filler-neck valve covers for the proper vacuum and hose fittings, and replace the old crusty ones original to the truck
- pull scissor mechanisms from some of the spare doors, strip them down, and refurbish the mechanisms.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
It’s December, so the interwebs are full of Best-Of lists for music by bands I’ve never heard of and TV shows I’ve never seen. Some sites are predictably more niche than others; I think I know three of the top 20 artists on the Pitchfork list, while Stereogum’s list is roughly 50/50 familiar, and Turnstile is their #2 pick. Last week during work everyone shared their Spotify Wrapped playlists, which I also don’t get to see because I’m still using the unpaid version. StatsforSpotify tells me that tracks from Deafheaven, Taylor Swift (I binged Shake It Off last month) Mayer Hawthorne, Hybrid, and Boards of Canada were my top ten from the last six months but I can’t see the yearly list—I’d bet it would skew wildly in a different direction.
I get a lot of special offers for custom printing every week due to my job, and it’s always fun to take advantage of a good deal. My sticker company sent me an offer for a $9 color printed shirt with free shipping, so I whacked together a version of the Old Line State Binders logo for a black shirt and sent it in. I’ve wanted to do that shirt for a long time anyway. The offers pop up in my social media feed too: I clicked on an Instagram sticker ad the other day, and suddenly sticker ads took over my whole feed. Avery is running a special on 10 vinyl stickers for $10 at any size, so I cobbled together a simple version of the Peer Pressure shirt design and ordered a set of 4″ stickers. If they turn out nice, I’ll use those as my calling card and start trading stickers around with other Scout nerds.
Our plans for snowboarding are on hold for the time being; Whitetail isn’t open as early as last year (or I’m not remembering the dates clearly) so we’ve got to reschedule. My guess is that we’ll do it in January at some point. I have to do some research into what weekdays are quietest so that we can maximize our visit. I don’t want to wait all the way until March, but I’d like more than one trip this season if we can swing it.
…I think one of the things that was obviously very concerning is that Mississippi had suggested in its brief that women don’t need this right anymore, it’s OK to force them to be pregnant and give birth and have a child against their will because things are better now than they were 50 years ago.
Slate talked to Julie Rikelman, who argued the Jackson Women’s Health side of the abortion argument in the Supreme Court last Wednesday.
When it comes to carpentry I’m definitely an amateur. Maybe a Pro-Am. I’ve done enough paying work that I maybe could sneak into the union, but I know there are years of tools and tricks I’ve never heard of or seen. Watching my friend Brian work humbles me. He can eyeball up a cabinet or a floor or a section of wall and have it measured out correctly in minutes, and know exactly how to tuck something too big into a place too small with ease. He’s got tools I’ve never seen before rolling around in the back of his truck, and he knows how to use them the way God and the engineers at Craftsman intended. I learn tons of stuff just by watching what he’s doing.
I can mill and frame wood with the best of them. I’ve built mantles and cabinets and toolbenches and all sorts of smaller objects, and most of them have come out square and clean and sturdy. I’ve milled and installed all the moulding in five rooms of this house. If there’s anything I’m professional at, it’s cobbling together some kind of jig out of scrap wood and hose clamps to get the saw or the drill or the router to do what I need it to do; the mantle I mentioned earlier was put together with nothing more than a miter saw, a circular saw, and a shit-ton of backwoods engineering. I bought, disassembled, and jury-rigged a crappy old router stand to mill a 15˚ angle on the thresholds for the bathroom upstairs, and then, having pretty much ruined it for any other purpose, threw the whole thing in the garbage.
Frankly, I’m kind of sick of that shit. I would love nothing more than to have a barn with a dedicated woodworking space, where there’s a large flat clean table to do joinery on, an area with a full-size table saw, miter saw, sanding equipment, and proper lighting. All of my carpentry is done in the basement, tucked behind shelving and assembled on plywood sheets atop an old table. I have to open the basement door to ventilate the dust out of there, and Jen gets pissed when the laundry comes upstairs covered in sawdust (I don’t blame her). The lighting sucks. I’m always tripping over cords or piles of wood or boxes waiting to be reshelved. The truth is, I don’t do carpentry enough every day to warrant this kind of space—but I’d love to pursue that hobby.
This weekend I decided I’d put together a frame for the mirror that’s going in the upstairs bathroom. We don’t want to just glue a mirror to the wall, so I’m constructing a frame with wood slightly narrower than the door moulding and beveling the inner edge to accept the mirror. Normally I’d rig up a jig on my table saw and make two cuts per board, but this time I thought I’d use the router and a square removal bit to accomplish the same task. For anyone with a router stand this would be a 10-minute job, but as mentioned I threw out the last stand, so I mounted a fence to the router and did it all by hand, generating a pile of sawdust higher than my knees. And because it was handheld, the results were less than optimal—the inside edge of the bevel was a bit wavy because the fucking bit began to come loose—and I’m a careful guy. But I thought maybe I could salvage what I had, so I kept going.
I also thought I’d use this project as a reason to buy a Kreg jig, which is basically an inexpensive joining tool, and use that to bolt the parts together. The jig is nice but not made for 45˚ angled cuts, so the test runs I did all came out too short or too long and I couldn’t replicate success with any precision. So I started drilling and countersinking screws, but on the first corner the grain of the wood carried the bit downwards and I busted through the front of the frame with the screw. That ended Saturday’s attempt.
On Sunday I bought more wood with Hazel and started on Version 2. In ten minutes I cobbled together a clean jig on the table saw and had three boards down neatly—exactly what I should have done in the first place. Then I set up a jig on some plywood, clamped the frame ends down, and pre-drilled countersink holes on the top and bottoms, where nobody will see them. With a carpenter’s angle and a screw gun I had the whole thing assembled in about an hour. It needs some filler and a little sanding, but it’s clean and ready for a mirror. I’m all about learning new skills and trying new things, but sometimes it’s cheaper and faster to go with what you know.
Sunday’s Advent activity was a Bad Santa Challenge: we each picked a name out of a hat and had to buy the tackiest gift we could for our chosen person. We decided we’d pick out but not buy anything so that we didn’t drag tacky crap we’d never use home with us. Jen and I figured the best place for this was the thrift store: where else to find the most tacky in the smallest space?
In Laurel we hit the Second Avenue and each had 20 minutes to find our treasures, with an imaginary cash limit of $20. I had Jen, so I immediately went to the tchotchke area and started looking; a woman was putting a 16″ porcelain statue of a nude couple embracing in her cart just as I was walking towards it. Dammit. I looked through that area, then went over to the women’s clothing thinking I could find something super-trashy like I used to in the Saks North Avenue days. But these stores turn over much quicker than Back In The Day and my tack-o-meter isn’t finely tuned; some of the stuff I saw could have been tacky or could have been high fashion. I did a circuit of the store, beginning to panic, and went back to the tchotchke area to discover a huge carved wooden sign saying LIVE LAUGH LOVE over some banal decoration; this is as diametrically opposed to my wife’s tastes as anything I’ve ever seen. I figured I’d hit it big but I was still a couple of dollars under my limit, so I picked out a battered golf driver from the racks of sad sporting goods and hurried over to meet them.
Finn had picked out a hideous birdhouse, a random crime novel, a strange army belt and a moldy 50’s pop music record for me. Jen presented Finn with a strange and frightening porcelain hobo statue, which (when powered by batteries) played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” After laughing over our presents, we returned them to the shelves and looked around the store for real. I found a Pelican knock-off case originally created to hold hideous overpriced watches and scored it for $5; the compartments are sized perfectly for camera lenses:
Five minutes with a knife made a comfortable waterproof house for my Fuji rig with the big lens, and the rest of the kit fit neatly inside. Now I just have to spray-paint over the stupid watch logo on the top.
I was a good soldier and took my cold medicine and got lots of sleep in the week before Thanksgiving, and actually made it up there in good shape. I think perhaps going from steam heat to forced hot air made my sinuses mad again and I came back with the same cough. Since then I’ve been sucking down the gold syrup during the day and the green before bedtime, and I’m just now beginning to get through the day without blowing my nose constantly. I think a weekend of good sleep and exercise will have me back at 100% by next week.
One of our Advent activities this year is snowboarding with Zachary, with a date set for next Friday. I downloaded the rental forms from the resort to fill out ahead of time and ordered a new set of snow pants for Finn to wear from Amazon. Next up is buying tickets. I think she can use a pair of my gloves instead of buying another $50 pair from the pro shop. We still have to work out transport logistics with Zachary but I’m looking forward to another good day on the slopes with my bros!
When we were at Costco buying Mom the Biggest TV In The Store, we happened upon a bin full of big, beautiful Christmas wreaths, the same ones I helped her hang on the outside of her garage. They festived up her whole damn house, so I thought I’d get a pair for our house too. Today the weather got up slightly above freezing so I climbed out on the roof with a screw gun and hung both of them up between the second story windows. The results were a little less festive than I was hoping for.
Maybe with some Eat At Joe’s lights on the gutters and fake candles in the window, it’ll look better.