I’ve had a set of Scout II wing window replacement gaskets on my bench since 2023, right before I bought the Travelall. Given the current temperatures and my desire to stay warm, I dug them off the bottom of the pile and decided it was time to get them installed. The kits come with two gaskets and a small bag of parts—a bunch of tiny screws and two rubber caps for the front of the window. The new rubber is beefy and strong.
The first thing to do is break down the old windows. If you’re like me, you’ve got several spares, and between all of them there might be one in good shape. They are 40+ years old at this point and have been mounted in a vehicle with a suspension designed for a covered wagon, so they’ve been shaken to pieces and baked by the sun. I’ve got four spare frames for each side, with two complete passenger frames (good hinge, good frame, solid pivot, intact latch) and one for the driver’s side. The rest have an assortment of problems: a broken hinge, broken frame, broken pivot, missing latch, or a mix-‘n-match assortment of the above. I gathered up the best of each and broke them down on the bench, starting with a driver’s assembly. The spring-loaded pivot was broken in half—a common problem—so after I disassembled it completely I welded two sections of 18 ga. steel to either side of the pivot.
Back on the workbench I installed the rubber gasket based on the instructions on Anything Scout’s video. I found the rubber pretty easy to work with, and after about ten minutes I had it installed inside the channel and ready for the next step. I fed the window back down through the pivot, making sure the washers were in place correctly, and lined it up with the outside hinge. Putting that back in place involves a pair of pop rivets on the outside front face of the frame. I stalled out two years ago because I didn’t have a rivet gun, but borrowed one from Bennett to finish this job out. The instructions say to hold the hinge as close to the frame as possible when you install, which I did.
Then I used an allen key to put four of the tiny screws into the backside of the vertical of the frame.
Opening and closing the window, I found that the top of the window wasn’t aligning with the top of the frame; the top section leans backwards by about an eighth of an inch which makes the whole thing hard to close. I figured I would try rebuilding the other side to see if I could replicate the problem and found that the same thing happened on that side too, this time to an even worse degree. It’s an easy thing to drill the pop rivets back out, so I tried that, put new ones in and got the same results. Doing this with a third test window also resulted in misaligned glass.
At this point I had two options. I tried using a wide-jawed pair of vice grips to get a solid hold on the outer bend of the hinge to try to move it outward in order to widen the gap at the top of the glass. This didn’t work; I couldn’t get enough purchase on the frame without bending the rivets to move the metal of the hinge. The next option is to buy a shoulder rivet kit from the original rubber supplier, pull both of the untouched windows out of the truck, drill the pin out of the hinges, swap the new rubber in place, and rebuild with new rivets.
My next step will be to break the spare driver’s window frame back down because the latch on the window is broken, and replacements are $100. The only good window/latch assembly I have for the driver’s side is actually on the truck, and that frame is broken at the pivot point, so it needs repairing in any case. So I’m really no further along than I was when I started.