This thread on the Binder Planet is amazing: a guy in Pennsylvania bought a roached out Scout II and decided he was going to rebuild the tub one part at a time. He started in September of 2018 and he’s already got the tub bedlined and in the middle of sanding and blocking. His metalwork skills are superb. This makes me want a full shop and a couple of months of spare time SO BAD.
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Bennett is now rocking fuel injection on Mr. Hanky, so he figured he’d ditch all the 40-year-old technology sitting in his garage. As we were beginning to wrap up with the project last week he walked out of the garage and handed me a spare Thermoquad he had sitting on a shelf somewhere. “I’m not going to need it,” he said confidently.
I put it on the bench this evening and looked it over in comparison to the known good International carb I’ve got already. The new one has a bunch of gewgaws and linkages and levers hanging off the body that I’m not familiar with; that’s because it was built for a 1979 California-market Chrysler 360 with an automatic transmission.
For comparison: the one on the right is a carb manufactured for International Harvester. The new one is in pretty good shape, so as a spare it’ll be good for spare parts. I realize at this point I just need to accept that I’m not going to finish the carb I’ve got and call the guy I met who rebuilds carbs for the International dealer up the street.
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As shown in the time-lapse I posted earlier, we made some serious progress on Bennett’s injection project. Brian stopped by my place at a little after 8, chilled from a top-down ride over the bridge in the white Scout, so I made him a cup of coffee and we got him warmed up before humping a cabinet up into the new bathroom and then hitting the road.
Bennett had an array of tables set up in the driveway with Brian H, and they’d organized parts but waited for us to arrive before tearing anything down.
The Brians crawled under the truck to start dropping the tank while Bennett and I looked over the instructions for the carb and began yanking hoses and linkage off his mud-caked Thermoquad.
Soon we had the intake open and clean and started test-fitting the mounting plate, got the new throttle-body mounted, and started working out the wiring.
In back, Brian braved buckets of mud and rust falling into his eyes to get the tank dropped and mount new hoses, then installed the fuel pump under the driver’s door.
After a quick lunch, we got back at it and re-hung the fuel tank while Bennett drilled a hole in the firewall to pass the new wiring loom through to the glove box. At about 3 Brian and I had to head out so that we could make it to the junkyard before closing, but we left Bennett in good shape with most of the heavy two-person tasks complete (re-mounting the fuel tank is a pain in the ASS).
At the junkyard, we were looking for an electric steering motor from a Prius, a Versa, or a Kia Soul to modify the manual steering he’s got in the white Scout. Crazy Ray’s was bought by a national conglomerate a while back (it’s been a year or two since I’ve been) which means they now have an app that lists the inventory at all of their yards (!!!) and the stock is all lifted up on welded steel rim jack stands. They’ve cleaned up the operation a ton and it’s much easier to find things now—they even provide rolling engine lifts.
We found the one Prius in the yard but the motor was already gone, so we moved on to the Versa. After some digging under the hood (I figured it would be at the end of the steering shaft in the engine compartment) I was ready to give up but Brian looked under the dashboard and realized it was integral to the steering column. Once we figured that out it was an easy thing to tear down the dash and pull the unit out.
We made it out of the yard at closing time, said our farewells, and headed home. Turns out we left some of the required parts behind—we needed to grab the control module and something else, so he’ll have to go back and grab those things this weekend.
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Carb_small from idiotking on Vimeo.
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One of the challenges and quirks of driving 50-year-old vehicle is that we are slaves to the fickle black magic of carburetion. Many carburetors before the 1970’s were simple devices with few moving parts, but as emissions and fuel economy standards were implemented by the government, engineers added all kinds of hoses and vacuum lines and secondary linkages on carburetors to eke every last molecule of economy out of them while they scrambled to update their ancient engine designs. My carburetor is one of the last evolutions of this need for economy and power: a Thermoquad, which looks like R2-D2 barfed up a mechanical hairball.
Electronic fuel injection finally came of age in the 1980s and made the mechanical complexities of carburetors obsolete. As carbureted engines are increasingly rare on the road, it’s getting harder to find mechanics who know how they work and what to do with them. It’s also a pain in the ass to get a carbureted engine started after a week of sitting.
So it’s with great interest that I’m headed to Bennett’s this weekend to help him install EFI on his Scout. He bought a premade kit from Hamilton Fuel Injection—the manufacturer whose tech seminar we attended at Nationals this year. It’s pricy to buy outright, but his reviews are impeccable and he tailors each kit to a specific IH engine, as well as helps tune the unit after it’s installed. I’m very curious to see how easy it goes in, and as I mentioned before, I’m seriously considering it as an upgrade to my engine.
Brian and I are also going to hit the junkyard to see if we can find an electric steering pump for his Scout, which came with manual steering from the factory. It’s been a long time since I’ve walked the rows at Crazy Ray’s so I’m looking forward to the day with anticipation.
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I took the Scout over to the Eastern Shore yesterday on an IT mission to help Karean out with her various bits of technology. She’s got a 12-year-old iMac, several iPads of varying vintage, and a handful of older phones that haven’t been backed up. My mission was to make contact with the iMac, get the photos backed up to a new drive, and then see if I could revive or repair the old gear.
It was a beautiful day, and broke sunny and cool. I took Hazel for a walk, packed up my tools, and hit the road. After topping off the gas and putting a quart of oil in the engine, I picked up some coffee and jumped on the Beltway. Peer Pressure ran like a swiss watch the whole way there—two finger steering except for some exceptionally bad patches of I-97 and the expansion joints on the Bay Bridge. I stopped in a bean field to shoot some pictures before I got to Karean’s house, and I’m glad I did.
We got a lot of stuff done, including some home repair (an electrical outlet, which had always been balky and loose, basically fell apart in my hands, so we ran to Lowes for some replacements and I re-installed it) and I hit the road at about 7:30. The air was warm and all the lights on PP worked perfectly except for the speedo gauges. I’m used to driving by sound and feel though, so it was fun to enjoy an evening drive over the bridge.
She ran flawlessly for another 150 miles. I’ve put a bunch of work into her this year, and every penny of it has been worth the trouble.
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Well, hello there. Four of my dash lights, which have been dead for about three years, suddenly woke themselves back up during a beer run this evening. The contacts on the back of each of these gauge pods (temp and oil are in one pod, alt and fuel are in the other) are finicky, and thus not reliable at 40 years of age.
I haven’t had a working speedo light in about 10 years, so I’m hopeful that one will wake up too.
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