Electrical

Radio, Radio

Looking ahead to the days when Darth is actually on the road, I was eyeballing the empty hole in the dashboard where a radio once lived, especially now that I’ve got a good power source. As mentioned before I think I threw out the old radio that was with the truck, but I’ve still got a period correct radio from the green Travelall. At first, I thought it was a Ford or Chevy unit based on some very quick research but doing deeper digging led me to a very thorough website with actual pictures and I was actually able to identify it as a Motorola 7SMI, which was standard for Internationals of that year.

This particular unit only had three wires coming out of the back: a black wire ending at one side of a fusible link and two green wires that ended in a terminal connector labeled 22. It stands to reason the black wire was power and I guessed the green wires were for speakers. Much like everything else in the truck, I assumed the whole thing was grounded by the chassis, but none of the service manual diagrams I have for any year showed wiring for a radio at all.

These units were developed at a turning point for car electronics, when things were moving from tubes to transistors and circuit boards, so they are a mixture of the old and the new. This one is filled with old capacitors and sported a phenolic-based circuit board, which was the industry’s first material of choice before they realized it wasn’t resistant to wild swings in temperature and switched to silicon. The 60-year-old capacitors were almost surely fried at this point. On top of all that, it’s only an AM radio.

So the question was: what do I do with this thing? Should I spend hours poring over electrical diagrams, a hundred dollars for fiddly electronic parts, and even more time attempting to desolder and resolder scores of capacitors just to succeed and have a scratchy AM radio that only pulled in rambling religious sermons from Alabama? I think you might know the answer already.

I stumbled upon a YouTube video where a guy gutted an old AM radio and installed a $15 Bluetooth amplifier board on one side, using the knob to act as a stealth controller. This meant disassembling the unit, of course, which bothered the traditionalist in me, but I decided I had nothing to lose.

The electronics on the left side came out relatively easily once I’d cut a bunch of the wires, and I kept all of the stuff I pulled out. Assembling the bluetooth receiver, I bench-tested it and found it paired with my phone almost immediately. So I used some of the leftover metal bracing to bend a new cage for the receiver, widened a hole for the stalk, and mounted it back on the chassis in the empty spot, lined up with the stalk hole. Then I pulled the old stalk pot apart to get the brass rod itself, and machined one side down with a Dremel to fit into the slot on the receiver stalk. With that extra length, the knobs mounted on the front as they did from the factory. Cleaning the whole thing up with some 409 and 0000 steel wool, I made the chrome shine again. Finally, I ganged the power lead to the receiver up with the dial bulb so that the dial will light up when the receiver is turned on.

The only drawback I see is that it’s not very powerful. I’ve spent enough time in 60-year-old trucks to know that you need volume to overcome the road noise, and this unit won’t cut it. So if I want to use it, I’ll have to find an amp of some kind to go between the receiver and the speakers.

The one issue I’ve got is that the faceplate that came on the truck doesn’t fit this radio. The knobs are spaced a little too widely for the existing holes. I could use the faceplate from the green truck but that had a Deluxe dashboard and was covered in black vinyl from the factory. So I could remove that, clean up the faceplate and use it instead. And of course I can find other faceplates at Nationals this year as a longer-term solution.

Update: here are some photos of the cage I build from leftover parts. I widened out one of the existing holes with a Christmas tree bit to accept the stalk of the bluetooth receiver.

Posted on February 21, 2025 | by bill | 5 Comments | Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Superbowl Preview

Sunday was a day of tying up some loose ends from the last couple of weeks in between snowstorms. We’re supposed to be getting a major accumulation this coming week so I wanted to get in under the cover, get some stuff buttoned up, and prep it for the weather.

First off, I drilled holes in the cupholder mount and the seat base and installed it with a couple of 5/16″ bolts. I’ve been waiting to do that for a long time, and it really looks good there—even in etching primer. I’m toying with the idea of taking it to be powder coated in black for some added durability.

I grabbed the bracket for the fuel filler hoses, pulled the fender off, and took some time to install it, the new hose, and a refurbed filler cap ring on the temporary fender. It all fit well, with the hose from the tank being maybe 1″ too short on the long side, but it’s good enough to reach the filler neck. So everything is ready for when the good fender gets sprayed and is ready to install permanently.

Then I used some zip ties and a wire holder to tidy up the fuse panel install from last weekend, moving the jumper wire up behind the heater plenum and directing the bundle from the panel upwards and out of the footwell. That made a big difference behind the pedals.

In the garage I fished out a sheet of 18 ga. steel, traced the pattern I built last weekend for the seat mount out, and cut it down with the angle grinder. When it was roughed out, I trimmed the sides down on the bench grinder and prepped it for the brake. I don’t know when I’ll get back out to Brian’s again but that will be another good project to dive into.

Finally, I wire wheeled the last three headliner bows and cleaned them up for etching primer. All five are now ready for a coat of the interior gray I used on the door cards, which will have to wait until springtime.

Posted on February 9, 2025 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Licensed Electrician

I had a windy, chilly Saturday to myself this weekend, and made the most of it in the time I had. There were several things on the punchlist I wanted to take care of, and I got a fair bit of them done.

First up, I pulled the Scout out and idled it in the driveway. While it warmed up, I pulled the old parts out of the back—the flywheel and clutch will go back to IHPA at some point for the core deposit, but I have to figure out how to get it to them. Just mailing the flywheel will cost more than a new car, so I think I’ll plan to meet them at Nats this year to do an exchange.

While that was warming up, I cleaned up the garage a bit to make things easier to walk around. It’s really getting crowded in there. When that was done, and after the space heater had taken the chill out, I sprayed a bunch of parts with etching primer to get them ready for paint, and looked through my bins for a couple of things to work on in the basement.

Then I lowered the tailgate on the Scout and spread the contents of my electrical box out to start work on the fuse panel. I’d already made a pigtail on the end of some 8 ga. wire for the battery side, and measured and cut down more to install an inline fuse next to the battery. I found a good place on the firewall to mount the fuse panel and snaked wire in through one of the grommets, then soldered connections to each of the leads from the relay. Looking over the electrical diagram for the truck I found that the heater box was on the accessory circuit, so I wired a lead to the back of the fuse panel and connected it to the relay. With the whole thing grounded, I temporarily hooked up a new 12-volt charging plug to one of the circuits in the fuse panel, connected the battery, and turned the key: Success! By this time the sun had gone down and the wind was blowing cold, so I cleaned up my mess and closed up the truck. But: Success! Now I’ve got the ability to add some more accessories to the truck.

Back in the warmth of the garage, I wire-wheeled two of the headliner bows to bare metal and sprayed them with etching primer. Then I pulled the driver’s seat base down from the attic and brought that inside with the original fuel pump from the truck and closed things up outside.

Down on the workbench, I set up a Hobo Freight spot weld cutter and started to disassemble the seat base. It’s more complicated than it looks, but came apart relatively easily (practicing on Darth’s cowl and both quarter panels of the Green truck gave me a lot of practice). The section I need is a triangular support that sticks out toward the rocker which looks like it would be a rectangle but is actually a parallelogram to match the slope of the floor both front to back and side to side. I took measurements of the seat base and started cutting up some cardboard, making a rough template with some painter’s tape. Then I cut a better version and set it up to lay flat so I’ll know how big a sheet of steel I’ll need to cut. This one is going to be a bitch to bend—tougher than the lockbox lids, because it’s a giant C-shape that won’t fold cleanly under Brian’s brake. I’m going to have to get creative with how I do this.

Finally, I soaked the fuel pump in oven cleaner and washed it off in the shop sink. It cleaned up well, but needs a rebuild kit. It’s an old-school Carter 3405 with an integrated filter in a second chamber; originally this would have come with a glass sight bowl, but the one I have is silver. If I have some extra time I’ll see about getting a rebuild kit and replacing it on the engine.

Posted on February 3, 2025 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Seats, Travelall

Chasing Daylight

The forecast for this weekend was for warmer weather on Sunday, which was great news. I got a very late start though, because we had a lot of family and house stuff to take care of first, which meant I only had a couple hours of daylight to work outside.

First, I scraped off the blobs of silicone and welded up the driver’s side of the transmission tunnel. This side had been drilled out in three places, probably for some kind of radio mount and the associated wiring, so it took a little more time because I had to cut out three round plugs to weld in place. I used 16ga scrap steel to match the body shell and quickly had the patches tacked in. With patience I welded them all the way in and ground things smooth. With some rattle-can IH red it’ll look like new. I figure if I’m going to be featuring my fancy cupholder in pictures to try and sell a couple, I’d like for the truck to not look completely like shit. I don’t know why I didn’t do this over the summer when I welded the passenger side up.

The second thing was to sand down a second application of epoxy to the spare steering wheel. This was to smooth out some low spots left after the initial application. The whole thing needs a careful finish sand to get it extra smooth before I shoot it with primer, but I’ve got to replenish my sandpaper supply first.

Finally, on the bench in the basement I’ve got all the parts collected for an auxiliary fuse panel: the fuse box, a relay and pigtail, 25 feet of 8 gauge wire with ring terminals, and an inline fuse block. I soldered a ring terminal to the end of the wire with a propane torch, and today I’ll measure it out to install the inline fuse and the rest of the wire, as well as figure out where the fuse block will live.

Posted on January 27, 2025 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Welding

More Light

This may sound like a simple thing, but simple things are giving me joy in a dark time right now: I’ve got working brake lights. After spending the time and money to source a new wiring harness, pull out the dashboard, swap in the wiring, and replace everything, I was much closer to a street-legal truck:

All four running lights work.
The headlights work.
The turn signals work, after some grounding issues.
The dash lights all work.
The heater works.
The license plate light works.
The truck starts from the key.

But that wasn’t everything, and there was one major roadblock:

The brake lights didn’t work.
The high-beams cut off the running lights; this isn’t a dealbreaker.
There is wiring for a dome light, but it’s constant power right now—there’s no way to turn it off.

Doing a little research, I realized I’d swapped the old brake light switch from the original brake master onto the new one, and most likely it was broken or clogged. I found a new one on Amazon (after some dedicated research) and swapped it in this afternoon. In two minutes, I had working brake lights.

So next up, I’m going to sort out the dome light situation, and wire three in parallel—two over the seats, and one for the rear cargo area. And as I mentioned before, I’ve got a plan for an additional fuse panel with switched power for more accessories.

Posted on January 17, 2025 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Cold Weather Projects

I braved 20˚ weather to sit in the back of Darth and weld in the valance above the barn doors on Sunday morning. The idea was to get out ahead of the weather before it dumped a predicted 6″ of snow on us, which it’s currently doing. It was a bit tricky, as I think the metal was cold enough that it didn’t promote clean penetration in the smaller plug welds I drilled, but I got the majority of it on and ground down for paint. I’ll have to do a little filler work to clean up a couple of places when it’s warmer as well.

On the brake/electrical front, it turns out the brake master from the green truck has an entirely different switch system (my guess is that the switch was on the pedal assembly but I haven’t checked that) so I had nothing to swap in and test. I did finally track down the part I need, Standard Motor SLS30, and ordered it via Amazon. So after we’re dug out and the project I’m managing at work is done, I can test it out.

I’ve been doing a lot of research into wiring in an additional fuse panel for accessories, and I think I’ve got a good idea of what I need and how it works. It’s actually pretty simple; I need a new panel wired up to a 30amp relay, which is then connected directly to the battery and a ground. The fourth wire goes to the accessory circuit on the existing panel, which acts simply as a switch. Turn the key on, and power goes to the new panel. All of the load goes through the new wire into the new panel, ensuring I don’t burn the truck down by overloading the old wiring harness. My truck was spec’d for a larger alternator but I have no idea if the used wiring harness I have was made to handle that increase in power. I’m going to over-engineer it so that I’ve got room to expand with things like A/C, a backup/rearview camera and electric steering, but for now just having some accessory plugs will be great.

Down on the workbench, I carefully drilled the lockset out of the barn door handle from Darth and laid the parts out. The used barrel I’ve got will not stay in the handle with the key in the lock, so I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and order a second lockset keyed to the existing door locks. I was really hoping I could get the used barrel to work but it’s just not happening. The handles attach to the door with two threaded rods which were rusted solid to the retaining nuts, so I soaked them for two weeks in PBblaster. I put two new nuts on the rods, torqued them tight to each other, and used them for leverage to spin the rusted nuts off. The rods were soaked clean in Evaporust and are now mounted back on the handles.

While I was diving back into locksmithing, I pulled out my spare Scout II T-handle assembly and looked it over. There’s a method for popping the lock out with a thin rod that compresses a brass retaining clip on the barrel, but no amount of PBblaster or lithium grease would free that clip up. So I drilled the face of the lock and pulled the top 2/3 of the barrel out. It was in such bad shape that the bottom 1/3 took some digging to pull out, but once it separated the handle was easy to clean up. If my lift gate latch closed all the way shut I’d look into buying a new barrel for this, but it doesn’t so there’s really no point.

Posted on January 7, 2025 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Small Victories

It’s been dry and mild here in Maryland for the past three weeks. Sunny, uncharacteristically warm weather yielded three weeks to enjoy beautiful changing leaves; usually there’s one day of beautiful color, it rains, and the trees are gray and naked until March. There’s also been lots of dry sunlight to work on the truck in shirtsleeves. The forecast for Sunday, however, was for rain, so I decided to visit the local pick & pull for some parts before everything turned into cold soupy mud. I was on the hunt for an electric steering unit from a 2009-2013 Toyota Corolla, and the app told me they had two on the lot. I carried in a metric-based tool roll and impact driver, and found the first car after a few minutes of confusion. Someone had already pulled the dash mostly apart, and most crucially, pulled the lower linkage from the bottom of the steering unit. The second Corolla on the lot didn’t have electric steering assist at all. So I consulted the website for alternatives and found a donor 2009 Nissan Versa several rows over that hadn’t been touched. It only took me several minutes to deconstruct the dashboard to get to the motor, and after a half an hour I figured out how to get it detached from the wheel, off the dashboard, and on the floor. Then I put a socket on the bottom of the linkage and with one mighty pull, got it disconnected from the car.

Back at the house, I laid it out on the bench, tested the motor on 12V power, and verified it worked. Laying it out on the floor with the two columns I’ve got, I’m not sure if I can use either one to make a new unit, but I think the one from the green truck will be the best candidate. Most likely I’ll cut the shaft at the bottom to disconnect it from the power steering unit at the bottom and find a way to construct one good unit out of the two. We’ll see.

The theory here is to have a unit that doesn’t need a computer or any other input to regulate the motor; with no signal from the CAN BUS, the attached ECU (that silver box) will always provide average power assist and return the wheel to center at any speed in what’s called fail-safe mode; and if the motor fails, it just reverts to manual steering. This is what Brian has on his Scout and it’s pretty slick—and his unit was from a Versa as well. Having driven his truck with both the manual and the power steering I can say it makes a huge difference, which is why I’m pursuing this project.

With my welder down, I had to pivot to smaller projects. As mentioned earlier, I had a bunch of things I wanted to knock out, and I got a fair bit of them done. First, I decided to use locknuts and washers to button up my mirrors. It took some travel to find someone with the correct stainless hardware in stock, but once I had that I got the passenger side closed up and mounted on the truck with little hassle. I’m glad I pulled the driver’s side off, because when I went to take the nuts off the rod snapped on both sides as it had on the other one. This was easy to put together, and it mounted quickly. Now both sides of the truck have refurbished, adjustable, period-correct mirrors.

Finally, I started to hunt down live wires on the rear of the truck. There’s a trailer plug with a tangle of wires hanging below the hitch that I can’t identify, so I turned the marker lights on and tested them for continuity. Nothing seemed to work. Another rusted bulb was hanging under the truck, so I tried that one as well; no dice. Looking up. I remembered there was a mystery wire running out of the rear quarter into the back of the door, and put the test wire on that: power! And turning the markers off killed it. So I put a splice on the wire from the license plate holder, connected it to the mystery wire, and used some new stainless hardware to permanently mount the assembly to the rear door. So that’s one more requirement checked off for a street-legal truck; unfortunately now the headlights aren’t working and the front turn signals aren’t lighting. So there’s more work to do.

Posted on November 10, 2024 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Junkyards, Travelall

Heater Box

Yesterday I got a late start on the red bus after I had a little trouble with the Scout. I’d driven her to get a haircut and pick up some new bolts for the heater box, and she started immediately in the driveway. When I came back out after the trim, she wouldn’t start. I was a little nervous because Jen was already on the road to Southern Maryland and I was on my own. First I checked for gas, and sure enough I was getting plenty of that in the carburetor. The air filter was clean so I knew that wasn’t the problem. My next thought was that maybe the coil had died so I pulled the spare out of my recovery box and swapped it in quickly. I still wasn’t getting the motor to catch so I did what I should’ve done first and pull the cap and rotor off to check the points. Sure enough, there was corrosion around all of the contacts on the inside of the cap, so I cleaned those off with sandpaper and the top of the rotor.

Replacing everything, I squirted a little fluid in the carb, crossed my fingers and tried starting it. At first she didn’t want to catch, but after about five seconds, she slowly caught and began running. I let her idle for a couple of minutes and then turned her off and started her again to test it out. Thankfully she started right back up. So I continued running errands for the rest of the morning and came home. I have no idea why she would have run so well in the morning but not after she’d warmed up and dried out.

Saturday’s goal was to get the heater box installed in the red bus. After some finagling with the box itself, I connected the cable from the dashboard to the passenger vent, which took a little bit of time because I couldn’t find the retainer clip that went on the chimney. I went through three of my bins before I found a tall plastic container marked “Random Travelall Bolts”. I spread those out on the table and found the clip I was looking for. With that installed, I put the box in place and used three new bolts to mount it to the firewall firmly. Then I made a mess on the driveway hooking the coolant hoses back up. I hooked up the leads to the heater box and tested those out to the switch on the dash; it turns out that switch system is keyed to the ignition, so with the ignition off, it doesn’t work. But the blower motor does fire up, so that’s another electrical question solved.

Next, I took the heater plenum, mounted that back up to the box and attached the defrost cable to the dash control. All of the cables are pretty crusty so it took some WD-40 and some effort to get those to work a little better. Both of the heater hoses are 60 years old and pretty dry rotted so I’m going to have to buy some new hose to hook up to the defrost vents.

Because I don’t want to pay $50 for two small door clips I went to the garage and pulled OEM clips out of my second set of Scout doors. While I had the passenger door free I pulled the wing window assembly out, which is in almost perfect working condition, and swapped it for the less-than-perfect replacement in Peer Pressure. It took all of about 1/2 hour and went extremely smoothly. I dunked the clips in Evaporust overnight and sprayed them with Rust-Stop.

Then I worked on the driver’s side door lock to try to figure out why it didn’t unlatch from the inside, and why the lock cylinder still fell out of the lock. The passenger side worked as it should—I could lock and unlock the door and the cylinder stayed in the lock on that side, but crucially, the inside and outside doorhandles worked the way they were supposed to on that door. There was something wrong with the driver side door mechanism that I wasn’t able to figure out.

So I pulled the spare green driver’s door out of the garage, laid it on the table, and continued disassembling it. I started this process back in March, but the weather got warm pretty fast and I put it aside for outside work. Continuing where I left off, in about an hour, I was able to get the entire door stripped down. I put the door latch mechanism back in to test out how the key worked with the rest of the system; it’s a lot more complicated than the one on the Scout and I couldn’t figure out how the key mechanism interacted with the door latch to stop the door latch from working.

Sunday morning I walked the dog and took care of some small errands before getting back outside; it was another beautiful day so it felt great to spend it outside. The first thing I worked on was the driver’s door; I realized pretty quickly that the rod on the back of the lock never made it into the mechanism and thus was spinning freely. D’oh! Once I set it in place, the lock worked exactly as designed, and I felt a lot better. I swapped the refurbished clip in on the passenger side and verified that both doors lock and unlock from each side.

Then I padded the top of the truck and pulled the canopy down carefully. I was hesitant to do this, but I’m going to need as much light as I can get under there, and I can’t have the canopy up forever. The top of the truck really looks good in the sunlight; it’s great to see my work clearly for the first time.

(the water hadn’t dried completely in the photo above)

I put some gas in the carb and fired the engine up for as long as that lasted; she turned over immediately. I really can’t wait to get the fuel system buttoned up for good, but I think I’m going to drop the tank this winter and weld some new metal in on the passenger floor while it’s empty.

I spent the rest of the day farting around with some small stuff; now that the canopy is down I have to finish up the weatherstripping. So I pulled the old rubber off the driver’s door and ran a nylon brush around the perimeter to clean off all the old adhesive, then hit it with some red Rust-Stop. When that’s cured for 24 hours I’ll put new rubber around the perimeter of the door to seal things up.

The biggest win was finding out why the turn signals stopped working: I pulled the instrument panel and found that one of the leads to the temp gauge had come off when I was messing with the bulkhead connectors. Hooking that back up, I got signals back, and I felt immensely better about that situation. So: progress on a couple of fronts that I’m feeling really good about.

Posted on October 7, 2024 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Progress, Travelall

It Works

This is just a test of the system; I don’t have the dash officially installed (still waiting on rubber firewall grommets) but I got a package of replacement connectors for the last two firewall plugs and swapped out the old brittle ones. Because I couldn’t help myself, I hooked things up and tried it out. The turn signals trigger the dash lights, so there’s clearly something not connected correctly, but the truck starts off a new ignition barrel, and none of the fuses blew!

Posted on July 23, 2024 | by bill | Leave a Comment | Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Weekend Update, 7.15

Before I left on vacation, I took a little time to pull the heater box out of the Travelall to gauge its condition and access the firewall behind it. Overall it’s in good condition (much better than it deserved to be, given how bad the cowl rust was) but still needed some work.

I’ve been installing heat matting on the vertical surfaces of the firewall, starting in the center, and worked my way to the outside edges after the heater box came off. I had to use a wire wheel to get the adhesive from the original insulation off, and then slathered everything with Encapsulator for good measure.

We then went on vacation for two weeks. I took the family to Portugal, where we spent week driving to see some of the sights. The rental company gave me a shiny manual Peugeot for our travels. I got so used to the European shift pattern that I came back and immediately forgot where reverse was in the Honda and Scout.

I also came back with COVID and missed out on working on the trucks while I was recovering, but got back to my projects the following weekend. The first order of business was to break into a big box from IHPA full of window rubber which had arrived while I was away. This contained the outer gasketry for each of the doors as well as rubber for the rear curved glass on the driver’s side which needs to be replaced.

Both of the rear doors on the red truck have terrible aftermarket gaskets that have dried into brittle crust, so I focused on the driver’s side rear door to start. The old rubber came off with a plastic scraper and I used acetone to clean off the residue.

The recommended stuff is 3M 08008 Weatherstrip adhesive, which I applied around the top three surfaces, and then pressed the gasket in place with some clamps. I had to look under the driver’s door to see how the other gasket went in place, and when I figured that out I used encapsulator to clean up that section before installing the rubber.

At first I wasn’t planning on reinstalling the dashboard—I’m waiting on the two small rubber firewall grommets to come in before I can put it in permanently—so I used the original wiring harness to practice putting the large connector in place. This was not successful, so I need to reach out to some of the pros to ask how to do it correctly. (I did actually put the dash in place and start connecting some of the easy things because the heater box and plenum are out).

It’s very hot in Maryland right now and I didn’t want to spend a ton of time sweating in the truck, so I sweated in the garage working on the heater box. Rust had eaten away at one of the corners and bottom of the box, so I cut a section out from the bottom and another section from the side.

I used the edge of a large hinge to form the wider curves on a scrap section left over from the seat cabinet project, where I’d already formed a 90˚ lip on a metal brake. I cut the other section out of 18 gauge and used the hinge and my vise to form the bends and curves for the corner.

I really need to either learn to slow down when I’m tacking together metal with the MIG or just break down and buy an inexpensive TIG for finish welding; I’m getting the metal too hot and not getting the best results possible. Plus, I really want to practice more TIG welding. That being said, it’s not too bad—nothing a light skim coat of mud won’t fix.

The interior of the box needs to be bathed in Rust Converter and then sprayed out well, and I have to sort out why the blower motor isn’t working with 12V from my bench tester. The radiator unit itself is fine, apart from needing a new hose, and this can get put back in pretty easily. I’ve got plenty of foam tape left over from a Scout II heater box overhaul, actually, so that part is covered.

Posted on July 15, 2024 | by bill | 2 Comments | Posted in Electrical, Travelall, Welding