Here’s a progress report on the Travelall heater box. When I last left off, I had welded two patches into the bottom and the corner of the box and head ground down all the welds so that the metal looked pretty clean.
The next step was to put some filler on the metal and try to smooth things out. The first coat went on roughly and I sanded things down to figure out where the hotspots were. Using the hammer and dolly I knocked a couple of high points down and straightened a major valley in between the old metal and the new metal that had formed when everything got really hot during the welding. With that straightened out, it was easy to put a second coat of mud on things and get things smoothed out better. Over the course of Saturday afternoon I was able to get a final coat of mud on things and smooth it out to the point where hitting it with 1500 grit sandpaper has it looking really clean.
As you look at the photo above, you’re actually seeing the box upside-down; the welds on the side will be mostly hidden by the A-pillar wall and the curved section will be under the passenger’s feet. Barely any of this will be visible, but how it looks matters to me, so I’ll keep working on it.
The next order of business was to officially test the blower motor out. The wire leads are shielded so it’s hard to get test leads inside the plastic, so I found an orphan pigtail with an old Packard male lead at the end and used that to make a solid connection. When that was hooked up the blower motor came right to life, and each of the hot leads (one is for high-speed, the other for low) worked as advertised. So I cleaned up the blower cage, greased the spindle, and put that aside for re-assembly. Having already rebuilt a Scout II heater box, that experience has been super-useful with this one because I know exactly what I’m getting into and I have 9/10 of the parts needed to finish this one properly.
Looking ahead to August and Harvester Homecoming, I wanted to address something that’s been on my mind for a while: a proper cleanup of the cooling system on the Scout. I’d drained it when I put the radiator in but never actually flushed out the block, so I had the folks at Jiffy Lube down the street handle that for me—for the extra money I figured it would be a lot more environmentally friendly than just dumping it out in my driveway. From there I headed down to the Eastwood store in Pasadena to get a new bottle of Rust Converter and found they were having a car show out in the parking lot. There were a ton of immaculately restored Camaros and Corvettes and the odd bubble-top Chevrolet; a couple of beautiful lowered Beetles represented the import crowd. I heard several people call out the Scout as I pulled my junk up just outside the ribbon tape, and went in to get my supplies.
The truck ran super-cool the whole time I was on the road; the only time the temp gauge climbed was while I was waiting in some traffic on 695 and even then it wasn’t too bad. She definitely likes to keep moving to keep air flowing, which is no big surprise.