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.
