I forgot to post about this a few weeks ago–I sold my droopy secondhand Harbor Freight engine stand on Craigslist for $40, after it proved it couldn’t stand up to the weight of an International 345 (advertised weight: 700 lbs.) I got it for free about five years ago after helping a friend load a storage container for shipping out west, so it never owed me anything, and it’s good to have space back in the garage. That money goes into the project fund.
Another friend posted a pile of parts for free on Facebook, so I’m going to head down to Annapolis on the weekend to pick up the only sheetmetal I don’t have a spare for: a hood. He’s got two in good shape, so I’ll add it to the collection:
| Driver door | Tahitian Red, great shape |
| Passenger door | Tahitian Red, great shape |
| Driver fender | Winter White |
| Shitty blue repaint | |
| Passenger fender | Tahitian Red |
| Tailgate | Tahitian Red, in great shape |
| Windshield | Light Buckskin. Minor pitting |
| Tahitian Red. Minor pitting, still has glass | |
| Front grille and valance | ’72 model year, Frost Green; in great shape |
| Cowl cover | Winter White, in great shape |
| Inner fenders | decent shape, need some rustproofing and patching |
I’m really, really tempted to replace some of my sheetmetal with spare parts so that I can go for the full harlequin effect. I wish I had a good door in a different color.
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I don’t have any money to be spending on the Scout right now, but one of the things on the to-do list is to rebuild a spare carburetor. I have two spares, one of which is of uncertain provenance and the other a direct pull from a Scout. Given that Carter made a million modifications to the Thermoquad over its lifespan, I thought I’d put the spare side by side with my working carb to see what visual differences I could pick out.
Apart from the extra arm attached to the main throttle linkage, they look identical to me. I did a brief comparison to my third spare, and that one isn’t even in the same family. The main body is cast differently, and there are a handful of inlets and outlets that don’t match up to the ones I’ve got, or are completely missing.
From what it looks like, most carb rebuild kits are ~$50. Peer Pressure has been getting harder to start reliably, so some carb adjustment is definitely moving up the priority list, and having a pair to tear down will help in familiarizing myself with these complicated beasts.
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Sobering, to say the least. This truck is the spitting image of Chewbacca.
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I got some time to plug the tire this weekend, after hitting YouTube to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything. It went very smoothly, and the tire is holding strong. I hit the tread with some white paint so I know where the plug went in if it does start leaking again. While I had a little time, I moved the fire extinguisher out of the console, where it does no good locked up, to the base of the driver’s seat.
On Sunday I took her for a spin to the parts store, and misjudged the amount of gas I had in the tank (again). I was coming up on the gas station on the way into Ellicott City and felt the engine quit; I hoped I’d have enough rolling energy to get up the hill and next to the pump, but had to brake while a woman in an SUV blocked my path. So there I was, stalled on an incline, with no brakes and no steering. I cranked the emergency brake down, put it in gear, and went to borrow a gas can.
So: what comes first for the spring? Drop the gas tank and fix the sender for good, or hydroboost?
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I got out into the garage for the first time in two weeks to run up the engine, and found a nasty surprise: the front passenger’s tire was flat.
A quick inspection revealed a screw lodged in one of the treads. I broke out the compressor and put air back in it, and it held for a day; Finn and I picked up a new tire repair kit at Lowe’s but I didn’t have time enough to put it in before I had to park her back in the garage.
But, before I did that, I took her down the street to the coffee shop and picked Finn up from daycare.
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I did some minor fooling around with the Scout today while the weather was warm. One of the easiest things to accomplish was swapping out the windshield wipers. I used ANCO 5913′s, which come with a bolt and nut ready for mounting (Thanks, Mike Moore!). All I had to do was pull the old blades and grind the rivet off with a multifunction saw, and bolt the new blades on. Make sure your kits have the nut included; one of mine didn’t. I had to use a 1/2″ 14/40 bolt and a locknut from my bench stock to hook up the second blade.
Then I pulled the dash bezel off to try and get the radio working again (turned out it was the ground wire, which we had disconnected when we were diagnosing the fuel sender issue back in the fall). Wile I was in there I pulled both purple-painted light bars out and replaced them with clean spares.Then I tried getting the speedo out to replace some bulbs, but couldn’t get it to come through the dash cutout, so I gave it up and put everything back.
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There hasn’t been much progress on the Scout front since the fall meetup, but small things have been happening. Santa brought me a couple of truck-related goodies, starting with a new tool wrap to replace the canvas one I was using before. The first one is heavy-duty but fat and unwieldy, and there’s noplace to put sockets. This one is made of heavy nylon and features a socket section as well as two sets of pouches, two sturdy cliplocks and a handle for carrying. The second is a book on engine rebuilding, which doesn’t answer every question but goes a long way to explaining the basic concepts.
I also updated the to-do list, which hadn’t been touched since last spring.
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We had a workday north of Baltimore the last week in October, and I was lucky enough to have about five sets of hands helping diagnose my fuel sender issue. What we were able to sort out is as follows:
- My wiring loom up to the bulkhead is not original, but contains original green wiring.
- The ground spade on the sender wasn’t connected (it must have come off at some point after we installed it) but it is now.
- The sender is working properly. We tested it for resistance and it works when we slosh fuel around in the tank.
- The PO put in a grounding wire directly to the frame, which I cleaned up with some sandpaper.
- The wire going up to the bulkhead connector works.
- The bulkhead connector is a mess, and has been screwed with quite a bit.
- Everything behind the dash is a mystery.
The service manual says we’re looking for wire 36-16, which checks out behind the dash but the wire going from the sender through the loom looks like 11. Additionally, the 11 loop (the one which appears to ground on a stud welded to the backside of the dashboard) was loose, so I reconnected that.
While I was there, I bought a Thermoquad from Jason H. for tinkering (it’s the one on the left; the one on the right will get rebuilt as my spare).
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