Author: bill

I put a picture up on Instagram of the Traveall T-shirt I designed and printed through a vendor promo a few months ago, and it wound up being pretty popular. Through that post a guy asked about the ’64-’65 grille I originally bought for the truck that I can’t use, and we DM’d back and forth. Turns out he’s got a ’65 and needs a grille; I sold it to him for exactly what I paid, which is pretty awesome! I pulled it down from the garage attic, still in the box it came to me in, and sent it on its way Thursday.

Other than that, I haven’t gotten any bites from my post on the Binder Planet, so I’m going to experiment with Marketplace and see what kind of response I get for items like the Scout II windshield.

I was able to make a Tuesday early-morning run up to the recycling center to dump the first jug of used-to-be gas from the truck, which went smoothly. When I got back I drained the last of the fluid out for a total of about eight gallons, and some small flakes came out with the remainder, which is a pretty good sign—if it turned to soup or filled the pan with oatmeal, I’d be very worried. I’m going to buy some good gas and run it through the tank to see if any more yuck comes out, and if not, I’ll just leave the tank in place. (I really don’t want to have to drop it if at all possible). I do know that the outlet hose is clogged with a wasp nest so I have to pull the wheel off and figure out if I can get around/behind the tank to replace it.

I’ve got the bodywork on the passenger side endcap pretty much complete; I sprayed it with rattle-can IH red for the time being. It’s good enough for government pay, and I’m going to move on to other sections.

Theoretically I should have a wheel showing up to the house momentarily, and when that arrives I can bring it and our flat CR-V wheel to the NTB in town to have new rubber mounted. I’m on the fence as to what color to paint the wheels, but I think I’m leaning towards black. Depending on how good this one looks I might paint it before the tire goes on.

I got a box in the mail on Wednesday with the paint I ordered a month ago, which is good news. Now the big thing will be setting up for and actually shooting the paint. What I’m going to have to do is put up my 20-year-old car tent in the driveway, find a way to block out the sides, and put something down on the ground to avoid painting the driveway. Then the roof needs to be blocksanded, degreased, primed at least once, blocksanded again, and then shot with a coat of IH red. From there I can see how it lays down and if it needs a second coat, as well as whether it matches with the rattle-can red I’ve been using over the bondo patches.

On Thursday evening, after a long day behind the keyboard, I went out to the truck and put my experience chipping rubberized floorcoating out of a schoolbus to work.

While the coating came up, the paper-based adhesive was still stuck to the wood, so I went back to a trick I used to clean the floors up in our kitchen years ago. I have a hand planer I used to remove the tarpaper adhesive under old linoleum. It had tried to eat its own cord at the end of a job a couple of years ago, so I cut and spliced the cord and then put it to work slowly grinding out the paper. It’s still very sticky so it gummed up the unit and required a lot of cleaning, so I only cleared out about half of it before the setting sun made things too dark.

By now you’re wondering why I don’t just cut this wood out of the truck and replace it; at this point I’m considering it strongly. Part of this exercise was to see how difficult it would be to remove the existing wood, which meant I had to expose all the bolts. If I’m doing my math correctly there are about 60 chonky countersunk Phillips-head bolts holding the wood in place. I think I’m going to leave this as is for now until I get the truck mobile, and then I can pull the wood out, spend time scraping and coating the frame from inside—not underneath—and then replace the wood.

On Monday I went out to continue sanding and skimming areas of the truck to get them ready for paint. The passenger side tailcap is coming along well, but will need a lot of attention to be clean enough to go to paint—but I’m enjoying the sculptural aspect of working with filler to get things smooth.

Recapping the starting issue, we’ve replaced almost everything in the ignition system besides the core distributor, but the points I originally bought didn’t have an integrated condenser so we tried to hotwire it on the workday. Testing for spark, we never got anything at the plugs. I replaced the points in the original distributor with a new set with an integrated condenser, and found an early picture I’d taken of the unit as it came to know how to wire things back up (see that black wire in the lower center of the picture above?). After I wired the second new set of points in as per the original and tested my testing light on the Scout, I hooked it up to the Travelall and then I had spark! Unfortunately I couldn’t get her to light off. So I pulled the carburetor off to tear it down and clean it out; I figured the accelerator pump seals were dry and the float was probably stuck.

I also started tracing wires under the dash and pulled the radio plate off to expose everything underneath; while I was there I pulled the old head unit and two dry-rotted speakers they’d bolted under the dash out and threw them in the trash to make more room. The way this dash is designed it could be much simpler to pull wires (or maybe even replace the loom ) than it is in the Scout, but I’m still trying to make a plan for how I’m going to get this thing wired up correctly.

Wednesday evening I was out sanding the truck and a guy on a big Harley parked at the end of the driveway; he’s a fellow car guy and stopped by to check out the truck. This marks the fourth person who has stopped in since I parked the truck in the driveway; clearly people have noticed.

As of Thursday morning the carb was partially disassembled and sort of half-soaking in carb cleaner, but I couldn’t get the float bowl or metering block off the side of the horn. I found a wider container to put the assembly in so that the affected sections were submerged, and was finally able to get all the sections apart on Friday morning. The paper gaskets had glued themselves to the metal so I had to carefully scrape everything apart to get it cleaned up—but the inside of the carb was very clean.

And on Friday I got two boxes of goodies: the new distributor showed up as well as some fuel hose, hose clamps, and a proper oil filter. So if we can’t make the old distributor work, the new one should be ready to pop in (minus a set of male-to-female plug wires).

Farting around with an old Scout II hubcap Friday night, I put it on the odd 15″ rim, where it fit well. Suddenly, a light bulb went off in my head and I realized that a 16″ tire won’t fit on a 15″ rim (duh Bill) so I’d have to source a rim for the fourth tire I just bought. It so happens a guy near here is selling an entire front axle assembly with wheels included, so I messaged him to see if he’d be willing to sell me the wheels (providing they’re the correct size).

I got a pile of boxes in the mail while I was away last weekend, which was a lot of fun to return to. The smallest was from SendCutSend, and it contained a wrapped set of metal items I’d ordered: a circular plug for the spare passenger fender, and a beautiful custom license plate bracket from my vector file. I brought it out and did a test-fitting, and it is flawless. I’m so impressed with this. I’ve taken it off until I get the areas around the holes filled and sanded, and then I can mount them up to the truck when the door gets painted.

The circular plug fits perfectly but it’s a much thinner metal than the original sheet metal; I clearly need a thickness gauge to know what I’m working with and then I can order the proper material to weld with.

The next item was a huge box containing a thick gasket for the windshield, which I walked out and began installing; it needs to heat up and expand before I can get the whole thing all the way around the perimeter of the glass. The other item in that box was what was described as “Pillar Seals” for the doors, which aren’t what I thought they’d be and don’t seem to fit anywhere I can figure out right now. I was hoping to get the pinch seals that go around the metal lip on the insides of the doors, but they apparently have a lot of different names for all of these products. So that was disappointing.

On Tuesday evening I took advantage of mild weather and returned to the roof of the truck to continue sanding and skimming; Wednesday evening I had a new can of Bondo and finished skimming the whole roof. Thursday evening I hit several areas that needed a final skim and some last touchups but the whole thing is just about ready for the next step. I also filled in the area where the old Travelall script was on the driver’s side and a bunch of areas on the driver’s rear door. Friday was more of the same, and then covering the front up before two days of rain begin. I also ordered a quart of auto primer and a quart of single-stage IH Red from TCPGlobal; I’ll need an HPLV gun from Harbor Freight to shoot everything in the driveway once the roof is ready to go.

Sunday I had about six hours to futz with the truck, so I continued working on the roof and driver’s rear fender. In sanding that side down I figured I’d better take the taillight off and see how it looked inside, and once I’d cleaned that one up I figured I’d do the other.

While the housings and lenses were drying in the sun, I poked an eyeball into the passenger’s side fender to survey the damage: someone had backed into something and crumpled the edge forward of the chrome trim ring, as well as put a dent down towards the bottom of the fender.

I gave the dents a few taps with my small hammer to see if I could punch the crease back out, and within a half an hour or so, and with the help of some lengths of wood, I had the metal mostly back in place.

I cut a larger block of wood in a wedge and used that to push the lower dent out by hammering it in between the inner and outer fender walls. Then the whole thing got a skim coat of filler and I put it all to bed for the night.

Still on hold is a new distributor from IHPA; they’re having supply chain issues and it’s apparently backordered. But I bought a new points/condenser combo like the original Delco distributor had; we should be able to swap that in and see if we can get things firing the next time Erick comes out.