My 9-5 job has ramped up in difficulty and responsibilty over the last couple of months. I’m holding down two jobs while we wait for a new director to be found, and it’s been messing with my sleep and my mental health. I spend most of my days on calls or writing emails to keep things moving from here to there, which is good for the organization but hard on my batteries. So the Travelall has been kind of a lifeline for me this year, even though it’s stranded in the driveway.
Saturday morning I got bundled up in cold-weather gear, gassed up the Scout and drove out to the Howard County Fairgrounds to check out a tool auction, which was both larger and colder than I thought it would be. There was a lot of amazing stuff there, from tables covered in tools to used farm equipment to saplings to lawnmowers. I met my friend Brian H. there and we walked the rows to see if anything caught our eye. This original KC Highliter light bar was tempting—it’s period correct for the Scout—but the rest of the lot didn’t interest me.
Auctions like this are tricky because you can’t just buy one thing—if you want a circular saw you have to also buy the rest of the stuff in the lot: five toolboxes, a space heater, three welding helmets, a gas stove, a box of Christmas decorations, and a bag of mismatched PVC pipe fittings. It’s not worth it unless you’ve got a place to store things or a lot of spare time. So we looked and left.
Back at home, I got to work on the Travelall, first pulling what was left of the old battery tray out and installing the refurbished one I bought from Marketplace. It went in with almost no problems—again, I can’t get over how easy some of these bolts have been to remove. When that was done I stripped the remainder of the window tinting off the windows and cleaned them up with Goof-Off. Vacuuming the inside of the rear doors I put the card back on the driver’s side and pulled the black window trim from each rear door out for an inside evening project.
Moving back to the engine I dumped some gas down the carb and fired it off again, messing with the plugs and the wires. Still no go. But I did notice the gas and amp gauges both working, which means not everything behind the dash is dead. Moving to the passenger fender, I chiseled the locking gas cap off and loosened the bottom of the inlet hose to disconnect it from the gas tank.
The worst bolt on the truck has been the hood support pin on that side, which didn’t want to budge. When I finally pried that off I was able to pull the whole fender off the truck and get a look underneath. Again, everything under there is so clean.
I test-fit the blue fender to see how it looked, knowing that using it as a replacement is pretty much off the table without the fuel inlet mount. If I get really clever I can have sendcutsend cut me two new pieces and weld them together with a rectangular strip to make my own flange, but that would come much later, when I’ve got some welding practice under my belt.
Once I’d test-fit the fender, I put the red one back on and fastened it with about half of the bolts. It’s going to come off a couple more times so that I can properly clean out the inner fenders, redo the shocks, scrape and paint the frame, and rebuild the lighting. On tomorrow’s to-do list is to wire wheel all of the inner fender skirts I removed to gain access to the engine, continue chasing the spark issue down, see if I can sort out more of the under-dash wiring, and maybe look into draining the fuel tank without spilling rancid gas all over the driveway. The gauge reads half-full, which means there would be 9+ gallons in there; I’ll have to see where I can dispose of it.