Butch from Alaska wrote in the comments about following the radio project I was working on, and gutted his radio to work with the same Bluetooth receiver I found. He mentioned he had a plain uncut radio faceplate painted black, but was looking for a chrome version for his truck. The one I pulled from the ’67 was chrome with black plastic inlay that came with Custom trim, so we worked out a swap. I got his in the mail last week and tried it out with the ’67 radio—and strangely enough it’s just a little off. The cutout for the central controls is perfect but the stalk widths are just a little off, which is baffling. Didn’t they standardize this kind of stuff back in the ’60’s? I hope he can use the one I sent up last Friday—it may be that he’s got to narrow the stalk openings to work with his unit.
A proper inlet fitting arrived in the mail on Friday and I had to wait until Sunday morning after the rain had passed to do a test fitting on the carburetor. I could only get one in blue, but you’ll never see it under the air cleaner. Thankfully, it cleared the water neck with about a half an inch to spare, so I tightened it down and made a list of preflight checks that had to be done before fired off the engine. First, I replaced the existing positive battery cable with a bigger fatter one. I’ve always wondered if I’m not getting enough cranking amps from the existing cable and decided to improve that situation. This took a little more time than I thought because the starter is in a really lousy position on C series trucks. It’s in between the engine and the frame rail and directly over the front axle so it’s going to be very difficult to swap out if that has to happen.
Then I pulled the plugs and put a borescope down into the cylinders one by one to check for any water in the cylinders. I did this because I drained a bunch of water out of the gas tank and I was afraid I’d pulled a bunch into the engine and possibly done some damage. I found no evidence of water or rust, just dirty piston heads that need to be cleaned up with a long idle and some time on the road.
Next, I had to get a bunch of new gas and get it into the tank, which is harder than it looks because I don’t have an angled funnel. After visits the three different stores I found something that mostly worked and put about 4 gallons of gas in the tank. Interestingly, the first time I turned the key to the accessory position, the fuel gauge worked, but it worked intermittently since then, so I’ll have to figure that out. With that done and the wiring to the Sniper connected, I cleaned out a jug and set it up in the engine bay to catch fuel.
The first test of the system is to boot it up and program it for the type of engine, cam, idle speed, and a couple of other settings. Then you program it, and do a couple of fuel system flushes to run clean gas to the system. After I did this, I connected the fuel lead up to the carburetor, said a prayer, and cranked it over for the first time.
It didn’t immediately catch, and I noticed that the Sniper control unit had rebooted itself; this should remain on constantly. Doing a little Internet digging I learned that other people have had this problem and it’s got to do with a gap in continuity when turning the key. Walking back through the main points of failure, I tested the jumper to switched power on the fuse panel and verified that was OK. The power leads to the harness were connected correctly. That left the ignition barrel.
This ignition barrel is brand new. I bought it the first year I had the truck, and I believe it’s been wired correctly, but clearly I’m going to have to pull it out of the dash and check it over again. I’ve got two spares I can swap in for testing—the original and the one out of the ’67. I’m going to go out and take some detailed pictures of the ’67 barrel and the one in the truck and compare them, along with the diagram I have from the service manual. I’ve been thinking about pulling that one apart and swapping in one of the new ignition cylinders (I don’t have a key for either one) so that could be a cheap way to test the system, with the added benefit of getting the entire truck to work on one key.
Finally, I checked for spark while I was turning the engine over on the #5 cylinder and didn’t see anything on the indicator, so that’s another thing to check.
Here’s an update on the dealer badge project I’ve had going for the last couple of months. When I last updated, I had poured a tin mold into silicone several times with limited success. Tin heats up fast and cools quickly, which makes it hard to pour into a mold—especially a mold with lots of detail—easily. So what I got was inconsistent and lumpy.
So tried resin. I was concerned mainly about the effect of heat on the material I was using, so I looked for high heat resin. This took a couple of weeks to arrive from the UK. Mixing it up and pouring into the same mold I used with the tin, I got a decent first poor, but the resin was full of bubbles and very soft and malleable. I was concerned that it wouldn’t hold up to heat if I stuck it onto the body of my truck in the hot sun, so I researched hard resin.
I found a kit on Amazon, and it only took a couple of days to get here. For the first pour, I tried was following the directions with a 1-1 ratio of the two components. The pour went fine, and after a few days of curing the final peace was very hard, to the point of being brittle. So much so that I wound up cracking off the D and U in the middle of filing it down.
Tin at the top, high heat resin under that, second resin 3/4-1 below that, and 1-1 resin at the bottom.
I then mixed up another batch at a 3/4-1 ratio. This yielded a good final piece, but with a lot more malleability than I wanted, and the mold was really showing the wear and tear—there was a lot of dremel and trimming work required to make it look decent.
This week I came back to the project and restarted by pouring a new silicone mold. I was more careful about how I prepared everything and only poured as much silicone as I needed. After letting that cure for two days, I carefully removed the 3D print from the silicone, making sure not to cut out any detail, and came away with a cleaner, more intact mold to work from.
Using the second resin, I poured a 1-1 mixture and then added a little bit of the base to give it a slight amount of flexibility. Curing it overnight on a heating pad, I pulled it from the mold this morning and was very pleased with the results. There’s a lot more detail in this final piece, I had to do a lot less trimming and will barely need to do any Dremel work to clean it up. Basically, all that’s going to need is some light sanding, and if it hardens as it cures with a little bit of flexibility, this should be good to go.
The 3D print is at the top. The new silicone mold is on the right, and the newest resin piece is below that.
So the next step, if this new piece works, will be to pour a few more, trying to make sure I fill the comma and period on the bottom. Then I can use some 3M auto adhesive tape to stick them onto each of the trucks.
Here’s the wrap-up video from the past two weeks, which includes all of the work I did installing fuel injection and the eventual solution to fixing the barn door lock mechanism, which involved a Dremel and some very careful surgery on a lock cylinder. This one took some time to produce because I was working with ~90 gigs of video footage which brought my computer to a crawl.
With the exception of one stupid fitting, the Sniper is installed on the truck, the fuel tank is back in place with a new sending unit and return line, and the hoses are (hopefully) routed in a way that will feed fuel to the engine reliably. This was not without struggle, and required a lot of problem-solving.
First, I was having issues with electrical continuity in the original fuel sender. I could measure resistance at certain points in the swing of the arm but it wasn’t consistent and no amount of adjustment was working reliably. I was afraid the issue might be my $9 Harbor Freight multimeter so I splurged on a fancier $25 model and got the same result. Doing some research, I learned that there are new senders available, but only for the 15 gallon tanks installed on pickups, which are a different size than the 19 gallon tank I have. I did track down a forum post from 2007 which claimed that a sender from a 1957 Thunderbird would fit with minor modifications, and the pictures seemed to show something very similar to what I already had. So I took advantage of a solid return policy and ordered one from AutoZone with free one-day shipping.
On the bench, when I compared it to the original sender, it looked a little different, but putting both of the units on the bench base and comparing the arc of the center arm, and their length showed that they were roughly the same. The new unit has a brass float and tested flawlessly with the multimeter, so I went ahead and put that in the tank. After cleaning the inlets on the tank out, I sealed everything up and got it ready to put back in the truck. This took a bit of maneuvering, but once I had the hoses in place, I jacked it up and got it into position.
At this point, it was clear I would have to modify the tank straps to allow for the extra inch and a half I had to add between the tank and the body of the truck to clear the return inlet. I cut the brackets off with the cut off wheel, and fabricated some new straps out of 16 gauge steel. After welding the brackets onto the strap extensions, I brought them out to the truck and welded the two sections of strap together. When they were cold, I cleaned them up, painted them, and then got them ready to hang the tank.
This had taken a lot more time that I thought it would. I fed the sender wire over the frame rail, hooked it back up to the wiring harness and fed the return line up through the body mount to the engine bay. Working methodically, I reattached all of the hoses to the fill tube, the vent tube and the fuel line itself. I was very careful measuring and cutting the hose that had come with the Sniper kit and it looks like I’ve got just enough to finish the job. The only thing left to solve is finding a 90° fitting for the fuel inlet on the carburetor, which butts up right next to the water neck on the engine. I’d ordered two 90° fittings and had them sent overnight via the jungle site, but the second fitting is just too long to fit in the space available. So I’ve got a call Holley’s tech support line to see if they can suggest a solution.
At this point, everything is complete, minus that fitting. When I’ve got that solved, I can put gas back in the tank, run a bunch of it through the system to flush it, and do all of the preflight checks for the carburetor computer. The other check I wanna do before anything else happens is to pull a couple of the spark plugs and eyeball the cylinders for any sign of water or rust. After draining a bunch of water out of the fuel tank, I’m concerned about it being in the cylinders, and I want to look for any signs of hydrolocking. If there is any water in there, I’ll bump the engine over a bunch of times to clear it out.
In non-engine related news, I did a bunch of work on the rear barn door handle on the bench to fit a door lock correctly in the barrel without having it fall out. What I had to do was take a Dremel and carefully carve a channel out of the back of the lock cylinder to accept a standard lockring. I used the pair of pliers to squeeze it down to be the same diameter as the cylinder, trimmed the outside edges, and then inserted it into the barrel. I was able to get a pair of lockring pliers inside and open it up so that it stayed inside the barrel. I installed it first thing Friday morning and just like that I had a locking rear door for the truck.
I’m sorry, I would have taken pictures but I was hustling pretty much all day Sunday from 10AM to about 7PM to get this done. I was able to get the truck down off the jack stands and under a tarp just as dusk was falling. Monday morning is rainy so I’ll see if I can get back out there on Tuesday to open things back up.
I’ve got the week off from work to burn up excess PTO time so I’ve been focusing mainly on the EFI install and procrastinating by tackling some smaller projects on the side. The EFI install is intimidating because it includes lot of things I’ve never done before and presents some mechanical problems that are proving difficult to solve. The instructions begin with the simple task of installing a fuel pump and two fuel filters in between the gas tank and the engine. This also includes a return line, something modern fuel injection needs, but my truck never came with. So that required dropping the tank again, drilling a hole somewhere in the tank, and plumbing a new line. Another complicating factor, as mentioned earlier, was that there’s little to no room in between the outlet on the tank to the engine compartment, which made the fuel pump location a huge question mark.
Dropping the tank was easy; I’ve already done that once. But when I drained the tank, I found a pint of what I can only assume was water, which was very disturbing. I know I emptied this tank out completely before I reinstalled it and I know I capped off all of the inlets so I don’t understand where this water came from. What I’m most concerned about is that I’ve been trying to start it and I’m afraid I may have hydrolocked the engine by squirting water into the cylinders instead of gasoline. After some deliberation, I’m going to continue with the EFI install on this engine, assuming I haven’t bent any pushrods, and we’ll see.
After the tank was down, I measured and test fitted and measured again and found the best possible place for the return line, right next to the sender hole at the top of the tank. This is the only place I could get fingers inside to tighten any bolts. I filled the tank with water, drilled a pilot hole, and then used a stepped bit to widen it out. The fittings that come with the kit were all aluminum, so I needed a wire to fish them back out after dropping them in the tank the first fourteen times, and found that using the wire was the best way to help guide the parts into place. I also fabricated a bent wrench out of 16 gauge steel to help tighten the fitting up inside the tank. After flushing it out with more water, I installed the return line and bench-tested the fuel sender, but wasn’t getting reliable readings. When I got the truck, the fuel sender actually worked, but I’m not sure what happened after I pulled it out. My multimeter is the $9 Harbor Freight special, so I decided I needed to upgrade that to something a little more legitimate.
Underneath the truck, I found the best possible place for the fuel pump and pre-filter was on the inside of the frame rail. That was all still filthy, so I scraped and wire brushed it, then painted it with encapsulator. The only way I could figure on routing the fuel line was to direct it backwards to the inside frame rail, do a 180° curve to the pre filter and pump, then go up to the engine bay. I ordered aluminum fuel hose for the bends because I didn’t want the hose kinking up over time and restricting the flow.
While I was puzzling over those problems, I was fixing smaller things like a sagging driver’s door. After lifting it up with a bottle jack, I loosened then tightened the hinge bolts and it closed cleanly. Then I bent some 16 gauge steel into an L shape, drilled it out, cleaned it with a file, and used it as an under dash bracket to install a USB charger.
Thursday started out being a gloomy, rainy day, but after about 2 o’clock, the weather cleared, the sun came up, and it warmed up to about 75°. In the morning, I drove up to a locksmith in Towson to have them look over the rear door handle and help me understand the problem I was having with the new lock cylinders falling out of the assembly. The guy behind the counter was super helpful, but he couldn’t figure out what we were missing. After talking it through with him, he agreed that I needed a spring loaded retainer clip at the back of the regular door handle lock cylinder, and that the ignition cylinder wouldn’t work in the door. I was hoping I would have more answers than that, but he got me to thinking about a way to solve the problem. I stopped off at Harbor freight for a better multi tester and then headed back home.
I took full advantage of the afternoon, warmth and pulled the old carb off the engine, cleaned up the intake, and dropped the sniper in place. After reading and rereading the installation instructions, I started roughing in the wiring in the engine bay to begin to understand where things need to go. Alternating between the engine and the frame rail, I sorted out most of the main electrical harness and crimped and soldered leads for the positive and negative battery terminals aligned for the controller is fished into the cab, and the main fuse and relay harness is roughed in on the firewall. I did find that the temperature sensor included with the kit is one size larger than the threaded hole in the water neck. I have a spare manifold sitting on the floor of the garage that I can examine to see how hard it would be to drill and tap a wider temperature sender. Of course, I’m of getting metal shavings in the engine, so this is the nuclear option. The other installation issue is that both the fuel inlet and return outlet on the carburetor are right up against the water neck and coil so I put a pair of 90° fittings on my parts list.
Under the truck, I finished the fuel pump install and with a handy delivery from Amazon, I had 10 feet of coiled aluminum fuel hose in my hands. It just so happened that they had coiled the inside loop at a little less than 6″ so all I had to do was cut off a section of the inner coil and I already had a clean 180° bend in my hands. I flared the ends and installed that, then started looking for a way to get the fuel line to the inside of the frame rail. I found a factory-drilled hole large enough to feed another 90° bend just above the spring perch and threaded an another length of aluminum through to join up with the rubber hose. It feels Mickey Mouse, but I think I’ve solved the fuel routing problems and I was happy that I was able to use the brake flare kit I bought two years ago on this aluminum. Then I used a punch to put a divot in the exhaust pipe, drilled out a hole, and installed the O2 sensor. The clamps provided with the kit were too small so I used a set of pipe clamps from my bench for the time being until I can get factory clamps in hand. When I get those I’m going to pull the 02 sensor back out and wire-brush the pipe for a better mating surface.
I got back up and worked in the engine bay on the wiring until it got dark and then brought some parts in to the workbench in the basement. The first task was to modify one of the door lock cylinders to accept a snap ring at the very back using a Dremel. I carefully cut a channel out of the rear of the cylinder and trimmed a snap ring down to the same diameter. Inserting that into the channel and inserting it into the button, I used a pair of snap ring pliers to widen it out so that it stayed in place but spun freely. Reassembling the handle, it finally worked as designed and I had something I could put back on the truck.
Next, I spent a good bit of time testing the original fuel sender with the new multimeter and found that it did work, but that was dependent on the angle of the float arm. Sometimes it made contact with the rheostat and sometimes it didn’t. Doing a little more research, somebody on the Binder Planet posted that the sending unit for a ’57 Thunderbird would work with a little bit of modification, so I put that on the parts list.
I’ve been itching to just get it done but have been practicing my patience as much as possible, and as of Friday I’m pretty happy with where I’ve gotten to. The biggest hurdles now are to understand the wiring setup, and I’m going to take my time to understand what I’m doing before I start hacking things up.
Looking through the Sniper install instructions, it’s looking like the most complicated part of the whole thing is going to be dealing with the fuel tank. Essentially, I’m going to need to empty it completely, drop it again, let it dry out, fill it with water, and drill a hole in the top for a return line. Fuel injection requires a return line to the tank for somewhere to put the extra gas, so I have to sort that out. Thankfully, the kit comes with all the hardware required, so that isn’t an issue.
The next puzzle is figuring out where to put the fuel pump and prefilter. Because the fuel tank is under the passenger frame rail and the fuel outlet is directly behind the passenger wheel, the fuel line routes up through the passenger wheel well and up to the fuel pump, only about 2 1/2 feet in total length. The pump and prefilter aren’t small, and when they’re mounted together they’re about 18″ long. I really don’t want to mount the fuel pump right next to the wheel, so I’ve gotta find a different place to put it. Ideally, it would go inside the frame rail, but that means I have to reverse the direction of the fuel outlet, and find a way to loop the fuel hose around without kinking it. The extra added problem is that the exhaust pipe is on the passenger side of the truck, about 8 inches away from that frame rail, so whatever goes on there needs to have heat shielding.
The obvious solution to this whole problem would be to cut the receiver hitch off the back of the truck and hang a new gas tank under the center of the rear floor. Of course, I’d have to figure out how to plumb a new filler line and solve a bunch of other problems that I’m not ready to face. So that’s out.
While thinking all of the stuff through, I scraped and wire brushed the inside of the frame rail under the passenger side, hit it with rust converter, and then coated it with rust encapsulator. Both frame rails need this treatment, as I’ve done almost all of the outside edges, but because it sits so low to the ground, it’s really hard to get to the inside.
Stalling for time, I spent Saturday afternoon trimming out the already butchered original radio faceplate for a single DIN-sized radio head unit from the Scout. Then, I repaired the wiring and mounted it in the truck along with a set of old school carpeted truck boxes we got from the repo lot thirty years ago.
On Sunday, we had plans to help our friend Brian install a two post lift in his new garage across the river in Chestertown. I met up with Bennett at a park-and-ride where he was waiting in his 67 Mustang with a seat full of parts and a warm coffee. From there, we caravanned across the bridge to Brian’s house. The plan was to drop the Mustang off at Brian’s so that he could install electric steering in the Ford like he did in his Scout 800.
After getting a little coffee and taking the tour, we started by sorting out all of the pieces and parts of the posts of the lift. We hefted the first post onto dollies and moved it into position. With three of us, it wasn’t too difficult to push it up and sit into place, and Brian drilled the holes in the concrete to set it. Thankfully, the concrete only got poured a year ago, so it was easy to drill into. Then we moved the second post in a place and assembled the crossbar to hang between the two posts.
The weather was absolutely perfect for working outside and by lunchtime I had changed into shorts. The instructions that came with the kit were lousy, and didn’t explain which hardware went to what. This would not have been a problem if all of the hardware was the same size, but we had to guess between sizes for different applications. Once we sorted all that out, we hung the equalizing cables, electrical line, and hydraulic lines. While Brian was sorting out the wiring for the hydraulic pump, Bennett and I hung the four arms off the lift shuttles and set the pads in place. We left the entire thing anchored in the ground and ready for electrical hookup, which Brian is probably going to finish this week.
Bennett and I packed up my Scout and we headed back west with the sides rolled up in full Safari mode, enjoying the cool evening air. We stopped for a tailgate dinner of gyros right before we hit the bridge and made it back to his house as dusk was falling. I got word in his driveway that my niece and nephew were waiting with the girls at our local ice cream stand, so I hightailed it back to our neighborhood for a chocolate shake with the family.
Here’s a video recap of last weekend’s trip. I’ve got next week off from work, so I’m going to make an effort to get the Sniper kit installed and running—stay tuned.
In preparation for Alan’s cleanout day, I packed up my Honda on Friday with a full suite of recovery tools and other things I thought I might need: a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, and a whole bunch of cameras. I put the pod on the roof, not knowing what we might be transporting, and also to keep the fumes from the boat tank out of the car. I left the house before dawn and drove out to the park-and-ride on Route 70 to meet Bennett. We loaded some tools in from his car and then drove two hours west to a small little town outside Cumberland, where our friend Alan used to live. His sister and brother-in-law have kept his house and have redone it into a cozy little getaway, but all of his car stuff is still packed neatly into the garage.
After a quick tour of the house, our gracious hosts left us to begin sorting out the truck and parts in the garage. Bennett and I had chatted about our plan of action on the drive up and agreed that the first best task would be to get the truck running so that we could move it out of the garage and make space to sort through parts. The truck itself is an interesting FrankenScout: it’s a Scout 800 body sitting on a heavily modified Scout 2 frame with an interior and exterior roll cage, gas shocks, and race seats. The builder went so far as to pull out the entire interior structure of the engine compartment, surround it with a roll cage, and then rehang the outer fenders. It’s got a healthy 304 V8 with a Holley 2300 carburetor and a bundle of unfinished wiring. Strangely, there are three pedals, but it’s hooked to an automatic transmission. And sadly, someone (not Alan) got their hands on a case of Milwaukee’s Best and a sawzall and crudely cut the fenders front and back to accept a set of squared-off plastic fender flares.
A face only a mother could love
We checked all the fluids, made sure the ignition actually bumped it, and checked for spark. Then we poured some 50-1 two stroke oil into the bowl and lit it off. To our surprise, it started almost immediately and idled until the fuel in the bowl was gone. Then it took some time to coax back to life, because it had been sitting for over three years. Most of the seals in the carburetor were dry and the passages were dirty. After fussing with it for a while, we pushed it out into the driveway so we could run it without smogging the house. We pulled the carburetor off and disassembled it, using brake cleaner and brushes to clear the jets and gas to soak the accelerator pump.
Our hosts brought us some lunch, and we sat inside in their warm kitchen and traded stories. They’re really nice folks; I’d ment them briefly at Alan’s service a couple of years ago, and it turned out they remembered Peer Pressure from being parked in front of the restaurant (it’s hard to forget Peer Pressure, really.)
Back in the driveway, we reassembled the carburetor and put it back on the truck. We were able to get it to start again from fuel in the bowl, so we decided to put my boat tank and fuel pump on the truck. Wiring the fuel pump to the switched side of the coil, we got the truck running from the tank. Working slowly, we got the accelerator pump to mostly come back but found that the truck didn’t want to stay running when it was shifted into gear. There’s something happening with the transmission or possibly the vacuum where it just bogs down and kills the engine. We chased down a bunch of vacuum leaks and sealed them up with no effect. So we let it idle for about half an hour in the driveway.
None of these parts are for Scouts.
We started looking through the boxes to try to sort out what he had squirreled away. His brother-in-law had cleaned out the house of the international parts and put them into bins, but our goal was to organize them by type and take an inventory. So we pulled everything back out and laid it on the floor of the garage. We made a pile for Scout 2 stuff, a pile for Scout 80 stuff, a pile for aftermarket parts, and a pile of unidentified IH parts. Strangely, he had collected a ton of random IH parts in their original packaging: tractor parts, parts for big trucks, and other stuff we couldn’t identify. Bennett stumbled across an entire bin of nothing but valve stems: all shapes and sizes, most unused, most with part numbers stamped in them, but more than we could go through in one day. He had collected tiny bearing sets for small engines and gigantic bearing sets the size of dinner plates. We found Scout 2 sheet metal: a decent used fender and several endcaps, and NOS B series fenders, all tucked under a shelf.
A forest of valve stems.
Back at the truck, we figured we would try to plug in the existing fuel system and fuel pump, so we took my boat tank off and hooked the fuel cell up after making sure the gas inside was clean and diluting it with the remainder of our good fuel. I took some time to shorten the fuel line loop in the bed of the truck, which was about 5 feet too long, and after attempting to get it running with the fuel pump in the engine bay, I moved it back to the fuel cell in the rear of the bed. We messed with this for a while and got the truck running again to attempt to move it, but at that point we were almost out of gas and it refused to budge.
This bin was full of used Scout II parts. Alan didn’t own a Scout II.
By about 6 o’clock, we had five big piles of parts laid out on the garage floor, mostly shaping up into identifiable groups. Our hosts kindly brought us some warm dinner, so we went back upstairs and enjoyed a lovely meal at their table. We talked about our plans for the evening: we both had brought overnight bags, but figured we could probably get through the rest of the work and leave late that evening, so we pushed on and started cataloging the different piles of parts and bins. We wound up with about five bins full of Scout 2 parts, a bin and a half of Scout 80/800 parts, four or five more bins of universal Scout parts, and two full boxes of unidentifiable International parts. Then we labeled everything and started replacing them on the shelves.
As we had been going through the different bins, we each set aside a couple of things we were both interested in: Bennett found a bunch of parts for R-series trucks, including a set of NOS shocks, a spare ashtray, and some other goodies. I found an air cleaner for a Holley 2300 2-barrel which fits the carb on Darth Haul. Darth came with a period-correct oil bath air cleaner which is a messy PITA, so I was excited about that. I found a Robert Shaw thermostat in its original packaging, and some ’71–’72 headlight trim rings for a Scout 2—an exact fit for Peer Pressure. Also, a mint Scout 2 AM/FM radio which might be a good replacement for the older model I have on the bench. But most interesting was a Holley Sniper EFI kit in the box on a shelf, waiting to be installed on Alan’s 2-barrel 304: identical to the engine in Darth.
After sweeping out the garage and returning everything to the shelves, we got the truck running one last time, and Bennett was able to start it in gear and get it to move under its own power back inside. We buttoned up the last of the stuff in the garage, washed our hands, said our goodbyes, and hit the road at about 10:30. I didn’t make it back into bed until 1AM, so I was pretty knackered Sunday morning.
After unpacking the car, pulling the pod off the roof, and sorting things out, I catalogued the parts and looked through the Sniper kit. The fuel box included everything the instructions mentioned, but the carb box was missing the instructions and some wire looms. I sent them an email update to work out a fair price, and we’ll get that taken care of.
I was pretty tired, so I spent most of the day finishing small projects; I installed the last seatbelt, organized the garage, and then took a wire wheel to the new air cleaner to blast the old paint and rust off. After a wipe down with acetone and a coat of etching primer, I shot it with black semi-gloss and let it dry on the carburetor. It makes the rest of the engine bay look like garbage.
Before this trip, I had decided my first and biggest goal for the spring after wrapping up a bunch of smaller projects left over from the cold winter would be to get the truck running and moving. My original plan of action was to sort out the original carburetor so that it was starting and idling reliably, swapping out the starter (which I suspect is tired) and the positive battery cable. Then I could attempt to bump the clutch enough to unstick it mechanically; the nuclear option is to have it towed to the transmission shop for them to fix it—after which it could theoretically be driven home. With the Sniper now on the bench, the plan has changed: I’m going to source the missing parts and install the EFI system instead, swap the starter and cable, and get the truck running that way.
I’ve found two main themes with my truck hobby: It’s brought me a lot of fantastic friendships full of adventure and knowledge. It’s also been full of amazing synchronicity: When I was finally able to let go of Chewbacca, Brian came along at just the right time to give her an excellent home. When I was ready for a new project, my friends enabled helped me with Peer Pressure and re-ignited my hobby and those friendships. When I had cancer, those same friends stepped in and helped me get back on my feet—and Peer Pressure out of the garage. Alan’s passing was unexpected and unfair. He was a great guy with tons of knowledge and always full of support. I choose to believe his EFI kit came at exactly the right time to get Darth on the road, and that somehow that was his final gift.
Here’s a recently unearthed shot of Chewbacca on the beach in Nag’s Head in about 1999 or so. My friend James is flying my kite over on the right side. In retrospect I’m amazed at how naive and trusting I was to drive 300+ miles in a truck I’d only recently bought, but I’d already taken her across the Eastern Shore to Assateague (150 miles) with no problems. She ran like a top, and it was loads of fun to shift into 4-Lo and get her out on the beach. I think we probably drove 3-4 miles over the sand until we found a section we liked.
