The Scout ran fine over the weekend, although with the rain I really didn’t get the chance to drive her too much. I did mount the new fog lights on the bumper to start organizing the wiring under the hood. The way the harness is organized I can wire it directly into the hot/neutral leads in the battery, but the way they prewired everything the relays are right next to the battery leads and I have no place on the driver’s side of the fender well to mount them. What I’m going to have to do is start with the relay location in the middle of the firewall and lengthen the hot lead so that it wraps around the driver’s side fender and directly into the battery. Because I don’t give a shit about my purple dashboard (I have two spares in the garage) I’m going to open up the vestigal manual choke hole to the left of the steering column and make that the switch mounting point.
I also started looking at pulling the steering wheel off the spare column I brought back from Flintstone. The first order of business was to get it mounted to something so that it was attached to the bench, which was pretty easy. Then I put two bolts into the wheel, mounted the cheapo puller I got at Carlisle and started cranking down on it, but when I was faced with a lot of resistance I backed off to double-check my bolts and reconsider the puller. It’s not anything pressing, and I’d like to save as much of the column as I can, so I’m going to resist the temptation to break everything to get it apart and take my time.