Rian Johnson has published all of the scripts for the movies he’s written (minus The Last Jedi) on his website; this should be required reading for any aspiring screenwriter. I’ll be diving into the script for Brick later this evening.
My brewing equipment has been sitting on Marketplace for almost a year now with few bites, and I’ve reduced the price several times to try to gin up some interest. As with some other things I probably should have sold this stuff at the beginning of the lockdown, but hindsight is blah blah whatever. Yesterday someone pinged me about buying the kegs and siphon, and I figured I’d rather sell it piecemeal than not at all. I took the kegs out back, hosed the dust off, and let them dry in the sun before loading them in the back of the truck. On my way back from picking up Finn from school I met the buyer downtown and made the exchange. I’d love to sell of the rest of this stuff to make room in the basement, so I updated the listing and lowered the price. We’ll see if I can get some more interest.
Finn has been without her iPhone for a month or so now, on account of 9th grade being a degree of difficulty harder than 8th grade was. We’ve got an agreement that she needs to keep her grades above a certain level to have access to her phone, and currently that threshold has not been met. (It’s also much harder to get grades back up quickly in 9th grade than it was last year). Without entertainment, her life has been dull. She was given money for her birthday present this year and wisely picked out an inexpensive knockoff iPod Fun Time! Music MP3 All Day Player Box from Amazon. When it arrived I intercepted it and loaded a bunch of music on a sidecar MiniSD card, as it wouldn’t mount to any of our Macs. I’m giving it some grief because clearly it’s a very basic knockoff of an iPod, but for $40, it’s a color touchscreen music player/radio/video player with 64GB of space; this same thing would have been worth ten times this amount five years ago. Anyway, I stuffed it with music and gave it to her over breakfast the next morning.
I tried to find the sweet spot between loading music I know she likes and stuff I think she might like based on previous conversations. The biggest problem is that I haven’t bought new music in years. We used to get CD’s from the library down the street but they’ve been closed for renovations since January (opening Spring 2024!) so everything I have on the server is at least a year old or more. That being said, she’s now got the classics she enjoys with Mom: Erasure, Duran Duran, the Cure, George Michael, Prince, etc. From my side I put some assorted stuff on there: Silversun Pickups, M83, Beck, and The White Stripes, as well as classic albums from Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Clash, and others.
We drove out to the Lowe’s to pick up some wood this evening and I asked her what she listened to. She said she made a playlist with a couple of Silversun Pickups songs, a few Beach House tunes, and one from Cut Copy that she really liked. I did my best not to be Ken from the scene in Barbie where he starts lecturing about what made Pavement so important and stuck to asking her what she liked and didn’t like so I can find her more music. We had a good conversation about it, and she seems real happy. We were able to hook it up to the deck in the Scout and rock out, and it put a smile on her face, which is all I’m asking for these days.
I spent most of Saturday sitting on the couch while my COVID vaccine made me feel sore and loopy, but it rained all day so I wasn't that upset. Sunday was partly cloudy but not actively raining, so after getting the dog out for a walk and doing some small errands, I got back out to the garage to keep working. At this point the box project is just finishing up small details; I got a set of locks from Amazon and had plans for how the doors should close.
The plan was to weld in a set of doubler plates underneath to add support, then carefully cut holes in the doors and widen them on two sides to accept the lock barrels, which are notched on either side to prevent them from spinning when the key is inserted. After doing a test run on scrap metal, I got this done pretty easily and used one of Dad's old files to widen the holes. After burning them in, and test-fitting everything, I carefully cut notches in each of the square tube to accept the latch arms. The passenger side was just short of the arm so I had to add a small plate on the face of the square tube to catch it.
I did some experimenting with thin strips of metal to see what I liked for doorstops, but everything I had seemed way too big or wide to work. Conscious of avoiding anything with sharp edges, I settled on a length of 1/4 rod from a different project. I cut 6" sections and welded them at the lock ends, then ground down the high spots so that everything is smooth.
Next, I wanted to reinforce the hinges, so I drilled three holes through the plate inside the box and welded the resulting hole shut. This way each hinge is borrowing from the plate but I'm not adding ugly beginner welds to the outside edges.
Finally I put a plate in between the two hinge bars from the bottom to make a shallow tray for tools or other gear. I'll cut a rectangle of floormat to go in there after things get painted.
I'm almost ready for paint. The last thing to be done is to weld in a set of gussets/mounting points on the backside that will go through the vertical wall on the rear step. Out of curiosity I called a powdercoating shop nearby and was quoted $100 from a disinterested shop foreman, so I think I'll stick with my budget rattlecan approach. So now I'll practice my sanding and filling skills to clean up the outside.
Outside in the truck, I pulled the wood floor back up and kept grinding at the rust. The needle scaler did all the work, and I made it all the way forward up the frame to the rear step. I was able to get encapsulator on everything before I had to close up for dinner, and I left the floor out of the truck to air it out. I have to pull each rear wheel in order to reach the outside of the frame rails completely, but I've gotten to most everything I can with the floor up.
After calling Super Scout Specialists twice in two weeks to inquire on having a new dash wiring harness built, they told me the guy who builds their harnesses is two months behind and hasn't been in the shop in two weeks. I thought about it over the weekend and figured I'd better place an order now to get the thing sometime this year, as I haven't found anyone else building them for a competitive price (scoutparts.com wants to charge an extra $3-400 over what SSS is asking; no thanks.) I've actually got a harness from a '68 pickup on the bench downstairs, so I theoretically could swap it in for what I have; I don't know whether or not they updated circuits between '63 and '68, though. Wiring this thing is going to take a lot of time and learning.
Meanwhile, my friend Ray from the BP has a set of five headliner bows up in Massachusetts he's going to sell me, which should provide a solution to a future problem: what to do with the insulation glued to the ceiling, and how to cover that up. There's an aluminum J-channel in later Travelalls that acted as a trim ring but from what he tells me it's very hard to remove and would be impossible to ship. I think I might experiment with some thin Luan covered with fabric and use these bows to hold things up.
The plan was to weld in a set of doubler plates underneath to add support, then carefully cut holes in the doors and widen them on two sides to accept the lock barrels, which are notched on either side to prevent them from spinning when the key is inserted. After doing a test run on scrap metal, I got this done pretty easily and used one of Dad's old files to widen the holes. After burning them in, and test-fitting everything, I carefully cut notches in each of the square tube to accept the latch arms. The passenger side was just short of the arm so I had to add a small plate on the face of the square tube to catch it.
I did some experimenting with thin strips of metal to see what I liked for doorstops, but everything I had seemed way too big or wide to work. Conscious of avoiding anything with sharp edges, I settled on a length of 1/4 rod from a different project. I cut 6" sections and welded them at the lock ends, then ground down the high spots so that everything is smooth.
Next, I wanted to reinforce the hinges, so I drilled three holes through the plate inside the box and welded the resulting hole shut. This way each hinge is borrowing from the plate but I'm not adding ugly beginner welds to the outside edges.
Finally I put a plate in between the two hinge bars from the bottom to make a shallow tray for tools or other gear. I'll cut a rectangle of floormat to go in there after things get painted.
I'm almost ready for paint. The last thing to be done is to weld in a set of gussets/mounting points on the backside that will go through the vertical wall on the rear step. Out of curiosity I called a powdercoating shop nearby and was quoted $100 from a disinterested shop foreman, so I think I'll stick with my budget rattlecan approach. So now I'll practice my sanding and filling skills to clean up the outside.
Outside in the truck, I pulled the wood floor back up and kept grinding at the rust. The needle scaler did all the work, and I made it all the way forward up the frame to the rear step. I was able to get encapsulator on everything before I had to close up for dinner, and I left the floor out of the truck to air it out. I have to pull each rear wheel in order to reach the outside of the frame rails completely, but I've gotten to most everything I can with the floor up.
After calling Super Scout Specialists twice in two weeks to inquire on having a new dash wiring harness built, they told me the guy who builds their harnesses is two months behind and hasn't been in the shop in two weeks. I thought about it over the weekend and figured I'd better place an order now to get the thing sometime this year, as I haven't found anyone else building them for a competitive price (scoutparts.com wants to charge an extra $3-400 over what SSS is asking; no thanks.) I've actually got a harness from a '68 pickup on the bench downstairs, so I theoretically could swap it in for what I have; I don't know whether or not they updated circuits between '63 and '68, though. Wiring this thing is going to take a lot of time and learning.
Meanwhile, my friend Ray from the BP has a set of five headliner bows up in Massachusetts he's going to sell me, which should provide a solution to a future problem: what to do with the insulation glued to the ceiling, and how to cover that up. There's an aluminum J-channel in later Travelalls that acted as a trim ring but from what he tells me it's very hard to remove and would be impossible to ship. I think I might experiment with some thin Luan covered with fabric and use these bows to hold things up.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Finn and I got our COVID booster yesterday, and I woke up this morning feeling as sore as I did on Day 8 of the welding project. I thought I’d be OK to get some stuff done around here but I also feel like my feet are about an inch off the ground, so it’s probably best not to be driving or operating heavy machinery. I took a nap at noon with the dog and I’ve been playing Starfield since 3, but part of me is itching to get up and get something done.
An old favorite, but for some reason the beat from Inertia Creeps is stuck in my head:
This album will never not be good; it’s high on my top 10 desert island list.
The beginning of the week was quiet, but I put almost two full days in over the weekend.
With the glass and other stuff out of the back of the Travelall, it’s much easier to start some of the preventative maintenance I’ve wanted to do to the rear frame and crossmembers. Saturday afternoon I lifted the rear bench seat out and pulled up the plywood floor. Then I put on some ear protection, fired up the compressor and the needle scaler, and got to work. Starting from the back I took as much scale off the unpainted metal as I could find, making my way to an area over the rear axle. Then I brushed on Rust Converter to everything I’d cleared and let it sit. I started around 4 and finished when the sun was setting, so there’s still a lot more to do—and I haven’t even touched the underside yet—but it’s already looking much better under there.
Reorganizing the garage a bit, I stumbled across an extra box of weatherstripping and realized it was doing me no good here. So I put it up on Marketplace and got a pretty immediate response from a guy in Washington, who was also interested in my old brake booster until I did the research and learned it would be something like $80 to ship it out to him in Washington. So the windshield gasket is on its way to him, and the brake booster remains in the Heavy Metal corner of the garage next to the old starters, spare Dana 20, and other stuff.
A brake has been instrumental to the plans I drew up for the doors on the seat base, because I wanted to bend a quarter-inch of metal along the edges on the three sides to add structural stability and make it look better. My Harbor Freight brake is woefully unprepared to bend 18 ga. metal at the measurement I need. On Sunday I met up with Bennett over at our friend Brian’s shop to get a couple of projects done. Bennett was there to clean up the carburetor on his Hudson project as well as tinker with Heavy D, which has been sitting there for several months waiting for a windshield replacement. I was there to use the heavy-duty finger brake Brian inherited with the pole barn shop on his property.
I started messing with the brake and putting a couple of scrap pieces through it to learn how it worked and where the sweet spot was. There was only one finger clamp on it, so the first long section of metal I bent didn’t stay still and bent unevenly. I took a break, had a donut, and Bennett suggested looking around the shop for the other fingers. I found them along the back wall and installed three of the fattest I could find, then put another long test sheet through. When those results looked much better, I marked out some new metal and started bending. We had to do some creative adjustment to the brake, because the bending plate was so close to the lever plate it wouldn’t release the metal when I’d bent the second side. This involved unscrewing the plate from the bottom to release my metal, but it worked. After I got two doors bent and test-fitted, I helped Bennett mess around with Heavy D, got it started for the first time in forever, and installed a choke cable before we both headed for home.
Back at the house, I investigated how I could bend the short edge with the tools on hand. I’ve got a cheap wide vise I bought from Harbor Freight back in the day, and after some testing I realized I could bend the width I needed with that and a pair of vise-grips blocked into place, keeping the entire width of the metal on basically the same plane. After making the initial bend, I had to hammer the center sections flatter with a combination of deadblow hammer, wood blocks, and metal scraps. When I had it flat and straight, I welded the corners up, cleaned them up with the flap disc, and trimmed the length of each to allow for the width of the hinge knuckles.
When those were in place, I tacked the hinges in place and test fit the doors; all my cuts looked good. So I flipped the hinges, cut some tack holes in the doors, and welded those into place. If I had to do it over again, I’d have put the weld on the underside, but I think it looks pretty good either way.
So the doors are in place, and next I need to cut and install a pair of stops opposite the hinge side for the doors to sit on. I’m going to wait until the locks come in next week so that I can design around those. I was originally going to cap off that gap in the middle, but now I’m considering adding a plate underneath to make it a shallow tool well to utilize some dead space.
The other thing I spent a bunch of time looking for last week was a hinge of the proper size for mounting the seat to the box. The hinges on the seat base are beefy; the pin is 3/8″ in diameter and the knuckles are thick. I found a lot of hinges with the right pin size but nothing with a leaf the proper length—the interlocking sections of the hinge I’ve got are 1.5″ wide, and most industrial hinges I’ve found with that pin size are only 1″. While I was at Brian’s, I was looking at his scrap pile and found a beefy hinge with a 3/8″ pin and a 2″x2″ leaf—exactly what I had been looking for. I texted Brian about it and he told me to take it with me.
Monday I had off for Columbus Day, so I got back outside and kept rolling. First I cut two hinges down to the right size, trimmed the knuckle widths, and test fit them on the box. When I liked what I saw, I tacked them in and fit them to the seat. With that confirmation I burned them both into place and cleaned up the welds. The plates will get two bolts through the square tube for extra structural support, but I like where things are sitting (literally) now.
Then I got out the needle scaler and wire wheel and continued working on the chassis while I had the rear floor out. Before finishing up for the day, I brushed on some Rust Encapsulator. I’ll finish coat it with chassis black when it’s all ready, but there’s a lot more to go.
Meanwhile, I’ve tried removing old upholstery adhesive on the vertical surfaces with every chemical I can think of and a rubber eraser wheel with no success. Frustrated, I tried a small patch with the wire wheel and found that with a very light touch I could get most of the old crust off without going through the paint to metal—there are a few places where the paint is very light—but it mostly came off with little damage. I was always going to respray the inside anyway, so I’m not worried about patchy areas. It’s nice to have that stuff cleaned up, for sure. I’m going to see if Hobo Freight sells a plastic bristle wheel for an angle grinder and see if that’s more gentle on the paint.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I stumbled across this photo of Canton online the other day: newly constructed row homes directly south of Patterson Park. My first house would be to the far left of this shot as far as I can tell, in the block directly in the foreground. It’s hard to see what’s happening in the immediate foreground, but if I had to wager it’s an area of low ground being filled with dirt and oyster shells.
I re-watched Interstellar last night before bed when the football game got boring and it popped up in my Prime feed. I really enjoy the movie whenever I’ve seen it, but something new caught my eye last night: the main character wears a beautiful watch which becomes a key element of the story and his relationship with his daughter. intrigued, I Googled “Interstellar watch” and the first article that came up was from Hodinkee, which did a deep dive on the watch and its companion in the movie. I noted the name of the author and smiled to myself; this spring I was talking with our operations manager at work and she asked me about the watch I was wearing. It turned out her husband works for Hodinkee and we both geeked out a little on watches. He wrote the article I found, and she took the pictures for a companion article about the other watch. I definitely need to ask them out for a drink.
A Travelall popped up in Pennsylvania on Marketplace yesterday, and I of course clicked to take a closer look. It’s a 1962 4×4 with a transplanted 392 in the engine bay, and originally came from Colorado. There’s only one shot of the inside and none of the engine bay. It’s got a liberal coating of what the kids call “patina”, which is to say, the Colorado sun blasted off all of the paint on the horizontal surfaces. There are a couple of underside shots which look very similar in condition to the red bus in my driveway, and there’s rot in the front fenders in the same places. The seller wants $17,500.
As a 2WD, my truck isn’t quite as desirable, but if I can get the red bus up and running for half of that cost, I figure I’ll be far ahead of the market.
As a 2WD, my truck isn’t quite as desirable, but if I can get the red bus up and running for half of that cost, I figure I’ll be far ahead of the market.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Saturday morning, Jen was walking across the street to church when she spied an antique pickup truck parked on the side of the road with the hood up. Even though she was late, she walked over and asked the owner if he needed a hand, pointing at the Scout in our driveway. After hanging up the phone with her, I hustled out to the street to see if I could lend a hand. The owner was puzzled; he’d just rebuilt the carb and had driven it all week but now it was randomly dying on him. I pointed out the gas seeping around the gaskets on the carb and told him I figured it was something clogging the jet inside. After a couple more tries he got it running again, and I offered to follow him back to his house to make sure he made it. He led me to a beautiful little farm in Oella where he had a mid ’60’s Corvette in one garage bay next to the original Deere tractor used to work the farm before he bought it. We talked cars and houses and threw his shepherd Barney half of a frisbee in the sunshine; he prank-called his son to tell him he’d bought my Scout. I had work to do so I said goodbye and extended an invite to stop the next time he spied the garage door open. All in all, not a bad way to spend an hour on a Sunday morning.