I saw an ad pop up on Marketplace a month and a half ago for a Scout that looked like someone had stepped on it. The body had been removed behind the B pillars and they put the traveltop over what was left, giving it the appearance of having been flattened. The ad didn’t say much but mentioned that it was available for parts at a used car dealer, so I filed that away in the back of my head. This past week I figured I’d give the guy a call and see what was there. From what he said nothing had been pulled yet, and the rig was in reasonably good shape, having just come from inside someone’s garage as a stalled project. So I packed up the CR-V and took Finn up to York for an early morning parts run.
The main reason I was up there was to get a spare heater box so I can rehab it on the bench this winter; I gotta have something to do with my hands. The second thing I wanted were the hubs; I’ve got one spare hub that doesn’t match the one on my truck and this one did. We backed the CR-V up as close as we could get and unloaded my tools. After hitting the various bolts with PB Blaster, I handed Finn an allen wrench to pull the bolts from the passenger’s side hub while I got the bolts off the heater box. With those gone and the hoses cut, it came out pretty quickly and it looks really good—there’s little to no rust on the metal at all. I drained the coolant and threw it in the back of the CR-V.
Then I helped Finn with the hub. The outer shell came off easily, and after pulling the snap ring on the inside the second section popped right off. The driver’s side was a different story, though. The hex bolts didn’t want to budge, even after a bath of PB Blaster, and I didn’t want to strip them. It was colder in the shade, and there was only a tiny bit of room in between the Scout and the van next to it. If I’d had more time, 2 extra feet and zero wind chill I would have tried drilling the bolts out, but I was too cold to bother with it.
I did grab the dash pad, which is black and looks very nice save some delamination at the top; I figure even in this shape I’d make my money back. The traveltop is roached. Both sills under the windows were lousy with rust. The doors were tucked under that, and from the looks of things someone had done some quick rust abatement on the bottom edges that didn’t look too bad. Sitting on the driver’s side floor were two boxes of parts that had been pulled while it was being stripped. The majority of it was stuff I already had two or more of (I can control my hoarding, I swear) so I left it there.
But two soggy NOS International boxes caught my eye: One held a brand new metal taillight housing, gasket and lens and the other held a front turn signal with the same parts. These are rare as hen’s teeth and the new repro’s are expensive. So I grabbed those too.
On our way out I spied the cowl sitting in the bed of a pickup truck nearby, and in front of that, a beautiful black fold-and-tumble rear seat. I hemmed and hawed over this last piece—it would look great as a replacement for the brown seat in Peer Pressure. I’ve already got a spare seat in the garage, but I’d love to standardize on all black for the passenger section. Ultimately I left it there, but I think I’ll call him back in a couple of weeks and see if he’s willing to deal. Overall I’m very happy with what I’ve got here, and I’m looking forward to cracking into this heater box as well as rehabbing the spare hub. And as cold as it was today (and it was colder in York), it was fun to get outside and spin a few wrenches.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Our utility is running a special on Nest and Ecobee thermostats right now, underwriting them for $50-100 off the list price. When Nest was first released I was keen on buying one, but as soon as they were bought by Google I wrote that idea off. Ecobee gets excellent reviews and their privacy policy is solid—my concern is that our household data might sold to some third party without my knowledge; I’m trying to limit that as much as possible. Smart thermostats need a constant power source, so I’d have to figure a way out to get a wire up to it. It’s compatible with HomeKit, which means I could control it from within our Apple ecosystem. Finally, the Ecobee has a geofencing feature that knows when you come and go based on your phone, but it only supports one phone. There are workarounds, but I’d definitely want the thermostat to know when we’re both home and away. And I definitely don’t want it sharing that data with anyone else.
Meanwhile, I realized after I was sprung from quarantine that Mom’s old TV actually has a built-in client for Netflix and Prime. After running a wire to the network drop on the wall, I plugged our account information in and had it up and running in five minutes. Then I went back into the settings and shut off data sharing. Wish I’d thought of that when I was laid up, but oh well.
In my news feed today, I stumbled on an article that mentioned the 818 Market downtown closed earlier this week.
But as of Tuesday a sign on the door notified customers “818 Market is closed” and urged people to check the business’ Facebook page for updates. As of Thursday, 818 Market’s most recent Facebook post is dated Jan. 30 and invites customers to pick up a bottle of wine for championship games; there is no mention of an upcoming closure.
We’re really not surprised; the idea was a great one, and they definitely went all-out on the execution. But Jen and I have been saying the same thing since before it opened: their scope was too broad. They tried to do everything—bakery, deli, produce, groceries, booze, and a restaurant—all of it admirable. But the baked goods were mediocre, the deli, produce and groceries were twice the price of anywhere nearby, and they were a block from a much better liquor store. And worst of all, their coffee sucked.
Jen and I got to talking over coffee yesterday morning about mixtapes and 45’s and the first albums we had as our own people (not inherited from our parents or siblings). In 1984 my sister and I both got boom boxes for Christmas (the exact model I had is in the picture above), with a selection of five cassettes to listen to. My five were:
- Rush, Moving Pictures
- Van Halen, Diver Down
- Def Leppard, Pyromania
- Asia, Asia
- Yes, 90215
Looking back on that selection, it’s pretty solid, from an early 80’s point of view. There weren’t a lot of clunkers there—the Def Leppard album fell off on the B side pretty steeply and there was some filler on that particular Van Halen album, but everything else was tight. I played all of these constantly and then when I got my first brick of blank tapes I started taping songs off the radio. At some point I probably had 30 or so cassettes like this, where the DJ was talking over the intro to the song, it played through, and they came back in again only to cut into another song. You Kids Don’t Understand, and all of that.
But man, I miss mixtapes. I miss the time and patience it took to sit by the radio and wait for the DJ to mention he was gonna play a Who deep cut at the top of the hour, and I’d sit with my fingers over the Record button hoping it would be Baba O’Reilly because there was no way I was going to spend $12 on Who’s Next for one song. I had a whole stack of “goddammit” cassettes, a hundred dollars’ worth of store-bought albums that sucked except for that one good track, and that really sucked at a time when when I was making $7.50/hr slinging tacos. Mixtapes may have sounded shitty, but we got the music we wanted.
