Two weeks ago, an ad popped up on Marketplace for a Travelette about 20 miles from my sister’s house in New York, and the only picture provided showed a very tired old truck lost amongst a stand of trees. I contacted the seller and he told me a little bit about it, then mentioned he had a Travelall further back in the field, and was vague on pricing. Later in the week, my brother-in-law generously offered to go bushwhacking to check it out, and he called me from the field to tell me what he was seeing. As I suspected, both rigs were New York-tired, meaning they’d lived a hard life on road salt and were well corroded on the bottom.
He sent me a number of pictures of rusted panels and cabins full of leaves and junk. The Travelette would offer a good grille surround as far as I can tell, and perhaps some glass, but there isn’t a lot of good stuff there to go with. The Travelall was a panel van, meaning the rear area where the glass lives is solid metal. But it was a barn door model, and there were some good parts left here and there from the pictures he sent; the ’62 grille and headlight surrounds might be worth some money, and the front clip looked like it was in good shape.
So, if I can make it up there this spring before the whole thing gets overtaken with weeds, wasps and water, I’ll stop in and pick up some of the remaining good stuff before it all oxidizes into the ground.
On Sunday I spent the majority of the day out in the driveway prepping the rear bench seat for upholstery with Jeff. They were still covered with foam and burlap after I’d removed the covers, and they needed to be separated, stripped down, wire wheeled, and covered in Rust Encapsulator. These two seats were an order of magnitude more disgusting than the fronts. Critters had made nests inside long ago (when I took the covers off, it covered the driveway in nuts and bedding) and the foam and burlap had been damp for a long time, so the springs were all covered in surface rust. I took them apart, soaked those bolts in Evaporust, and wire wheeled the outside of the frames. Then I brushed on Rust Enapsulator over all of the exposed metal, and when that had dried, sprayed the rest with black Rust Stop.
May 2023
March 2024
Meanwhile, I sanded the high points off the driver’s fender, skimmed some new mud over top, sanded it again, and skimmed a light amount on top to build up the body line for feathering out. It’s really close—it might take one or two light layers of filler to nail the ridge perfectly, but I can see how it’s a million times better than my original attempt to fix the problem.