Category: Travelall
Unfulfilled
Saturday I had the afternoon to fiddle with the truck, so I focused on getting the clutch unstuck. First I stopped at Hobo Freight to pick up some long pry tools to separate the clutch plate from the flywheel. Later I climbed under the truck and tried to get the tools where they needed to be, but found that the angle required was too great—the bellhousing made it impossible to get the tools I had in the proper position.
The next possibility is to run the engine to temperature and heat soak the clutch, so I focused on getting her started. While I was able to get her to idle last weekend I couldn’t get her to catch at all with gas in the bowl.
Sunday morning I had a little time before a junkyard run to pull the plugs on Darth. All of them except #5 and 7 on the driver’s side were pretty fouled with gas and oil, so I cleaned them off and put them back in. I also checked the other wires for corrosion and re-routed them all above the water pump neck. With that done, I connected the boat tank behind the filter, powered the electric pump and tried cranking the truck over, but still couldn’t get it to catch. At this point I’m thinking the carburetor needs to be pulled off and cleaned out again, because I can get fuel to the bowl and I know I’m getting spark to the plugs.
At 11, Bennett pulled up to the house in his Scout. We transferred tools and drove Peer Pressure to a junkyard on the eastern side of Baltimore to pick parts off a Chrysler Crossfire they’ve had in their yard for two weeks. He’d already been over there once to get some stuff but wanted to return for some other things before it got scrapped. His Crossfire is almost 20 years old now and a lot of small things are breaking, so he had a long list of plastic parts and other fasteners to grab. The two big things on his list were an intact windshield and the corner of the rocker panel behind the driver side door. The car had been picked over pretty well, so we got what we could and he focused on cutting the rocker out with a Sawzall while I tried to cut away the glue around the windshield. He was stymied by a thick section of structural metal under the outer skin and a dying set of batteries, and I was stopped by rock-hard glue that prevented any blade I had from cutting.
The junkyard on this side of town has always been an interesting place to experience the wide spectrum of humanity; all the self-service yards around here have the same grubby, slightly institutional feel of a prison, but this one is the grubbiest. It always feels like one is visiting a shady uncle doing time for a meth bust. While we were pulling parts we had two different men stop by and ask to borrow our impact driver; both reeked of pot and could barely stand, let alone talk. I demurred, assuming I would never see my tool again—figuring the chances were equal they would either steal it or wander off, forget where they were, and fall asleep in one of the cars.
We then found a 2009 Nissan Versa and proceeded to demolish the plastic dashboard to expose the electric steering unit underneath. The one I’d disassembled last year had already been partially deconstructed due to a head-on collision, but this one was intact so we had to get physical with the plastics and fasteners. Once we’d cut away half the dashboard and wrapped it up over the passenger side, the guts were easier to reach and we got the unit out in one piece. Then we had to prop the column up over the wheelbarrow and remove the airbag, steering wheel, and control stalks so that he wouldn’t be charged for the extra elements. With those safely collected, I made a brief stop at a CR-V to pull the driver’s sunvisor and then we headed for home.
So there wasn’t much forward progress with the truck, which has me feeling blue. But here’s a recap video from the last two weeks:
Bump Start
While it may look from the outside like I go into every workday with a plan, the truth is that I rarely do unless I’ve got a clear plan mapped out. In the cases where there is no plan, I often spend the day bouncing from one small project to another letting my ADD get the better of me. So in the spirit of using this page both as a place to record what I’ve already done and keep a list of things I intend to do, here’s another list.
One of my main goals is to unstick the clutch in the driveway. The inspection cover is still off, and I’ve been squirting PBblaster between the flywheel and clutch disc every day, but I suspect I’ve got to do a couple of things to really make a difference:
- Put it in neutral and bump the starter to spin the flywheel around.
- Spray penetrant on this newly exposed area.
- Prop the clutch pedal down so it’s mechanically disengaged.
- Get underneath and, with a thin metal putty knife, and try to separate the clutch and flywheel.
- Add more penetrant, bump the starter to spin the disc, and repeat.
- If that doesn’t work, the next step will be to put it in high gear, hold down the brakes, and bump the starter. This might release the clutch.
- If that fails, the next suggestion is to get the truck idling to temperature to let the heat expand the two surfaces and hopefully the combination of that and penetrant will help unstick the two.
I’ve got to pick up some new fuel filters and exchange my long battery cable for a shorter one first, so a trip to the auto parts store is the first order of business.
Inspiration and Education
I’ve found a new ASMR mechanic fix-it YouTube channel that does away with a lot of the stuff that annoys me about most of the other channels out there. Like podcasts, the channels I follow are graded by the content, the presentation, and narration. The last one can be a make or break for me: if the narrator is annoying or has a terrible voice, I’m usually out. There’s a ton of content out there that fit into my areas of interest but which I can’t stand due to failures in the categories above.
Simon Fordman hosts a channel where all he does is fix cars. There’s no audio narration, which demands close attention because he puts it in the closed captioning—so if you want to follow along you’ve got to keep a close eye on things. Watching his latest video, he fixes a formerly abandoned AMC Javelin with starting, idling and brake issues, and just by watching I realized there are three things I need to investigate on Darth Haul: the choppy idle could be a fuel issue or it could be that the points are corroded. He does a simple test at idle to figure out which plugs aren’t firing, checks the gap on the points, and adjusts the timing at the distributor to smooth the engine out.
The car cover I’ve been using tends to trap moisture inside when it’s on the truck. I’ve noticed dampness in the engine bay immediately after removing it, and I’ll bet that’s had some effect on the electronics under the hood. So I’ve got a game plan for my next workday:
- Replace the fuel filter and see if that solves the delivery issue.
- Pull the plugs one by one to see which cylinders aren’t firing.
- Adjust the gap in the points to (hopefully) solve that issue. If not, try another compression test.
- Adjust the timing again to smooth out the idle.
Back to Life
Getting Darth started and running has been at the top of my list for the last month, and it’s been postponed by bad weather. Jen was out of town this Saturday and I wanted to take advantage of that—she hates the exhaust fumes—so I got to work as soon as I could. The first issue was fuel. Last weekend I had her running off fuel I poured in the carb but I couldn’t get her running long enough to pull fuel up into the filter. The other issue was that the negative battery cable had given up and was getting hot to the touch almost immediately after cranking, so I swapped in a new one.
I started out yesterday by hooking my electric pump up to the hose right below the filter and verifying that the pickup wasn’t blocked. With that setup I got her idling roughly off the boat tank, having to stay next to the carb to alternately adjust the choke and accelerator. I backed the idle screws out a quarter and then a half turn with no effect, and kept her running for about five minutes before shutting her down. The idle is more of a gallop, which definitely points to fuel issues, and it’s different than when I had her running last year. The good news is that the exhaust is clear—there’s no white or blue smoke.
I pulled the electric fuel pump off and tried running it off the mechanical unit with no luck. Figuring something was wrong with the mechanical unit, I jacked up the front end, crawled underneath, and pulled it off. It was full of fuel, and I couldn’t see any issues with it—no leaks or damage. So I put it back on, tightened up the connections, and figured I’d sit back and have a think.
The easiest and quickest solution is to just buy a new pump (and a couple of filters), but before I fire the parts cannon I want to review what I know and see if there’s anything I’m missing. The way I’m seeing it, the next move is:
- Replace the fuel filter and see if it’ll pull from the tank. If not,
- Put the electric pump on to prime the mechanical pump, and see if that cleans up the idle. if not,
- Replace the mechanical pump and see if that pulls from the tank.
That took the better part of the morning into the afternoon, and by then the wind was picking up. It started as a warm day but got colder as a front moved in, so I did some minor stuff inside the cab and then moved to the garage. I cut a new pattern for the bench seat support out of 20 gauge steel, measured and marked everything out, and trimmed it up. Then I screwed my bender into the floor and carefully aligned things up. 20 gauge steel is much easier to bend than 16 (what was I thinking) and in about an hour I had a new support formed, with the final adjustments to be made when I cut the old piece out of the truck.
While I’ve got the girl up on jack stands, I’m going to spray the area between the clutch and flywheel with some PBblaster to see if I can get the two to separate. If by some chance I can free things up, I can avoid a costly tow and transmission job, which I’d love to be able to do.
#goals
Inventory Management
Temperatures are still in the 30s this weekend so I made a list of projects I could do inside or in colder weather. The first and most important was to start up the Scout, get it out in the driveway and warmed up. It’s been two weeks since I’ve started her and she was a little grumpy but once she warmed up the lifter tick went away like always. I’m still very much not used to the new clutch. Then I played musical chairs with a new gas cap meant for the Travelall, but which didn’t fit properly anywhere. I’d ordered a Stant locking cap, but they gave me some weird Chinese offbrand with a huge gasket that didn’t fit. I tried it on all of the vehicles and it just barely fit on the Scout, but that’s not good enough, so it’s going back.
Next was something that’s had to be done for a long time: I continued making an inventory of all of the stuff in the bins out in the garage. At this point there are 10 of them out there and I only have the vaguest notion of what’s in each one. So I brought my laptop out and added the contents into a spreadsheet I’d started last week in the basement. This took a lot more time than I thought it would, but I found a bunch of things that are gonna come in handy in the next couple of weeks. in one bin was the original gas cap from the Travelall, which I had forgotten I had. I walked that right out and put it on the truck.
I also found the original Carter glass bowl fuel pump from Darth, which I’d like to rebuild, as well as the Holley 2300 from the green truck. A quick comparison to the carb on Darth shows some basic differences: the fuel inlet is on the opposite side, and all of the extra bracketry for remote throttle and choke control are missing. The longterm plan for Darth is to add fuel injection of some kind, so I’m not going to rebuild this one, but it’s nice to have a spare.
The whole process took about two hours. Most importantly, I need to find a better way of organizing this information. Ideally, it would be some sort of searchable database that I could access from my phone. My friend Bennett has an app called Sortly that he uses for his inventory, but I am resisting adding yet another app to my phone.
After lunch, I took the Scout out and filled up a 5 gallon gas can to bring back and pour into the Travelall. First, I pulled the fill tube off the pipe and properly hose clamped it then reassembled everything. The angle of the fill tube is such that it requires a funnel with a gas can, which is kind of annoying. I had to tighten a couple of the other house clamps up. Then I put some 50-1 oil in the carb and tried to light the truck off a couple of times. I noticed that the battery seemed to be dying off pretty quickly, which is strange, because it’s on a battery tender. Then I noticed that a bit of smoke coming from the negative terminal on the battery and realize that I need a new negative cable. Or, at least, I’ve got to unbolt it from the engine block and clean up the connection.
The next thing on the list was breaking out the welder and repairing one of my spare wing window units. I’m finally picking up a long delayed project of replacing the Scout wing window rubber. I think I started this project right before I got to Travelall and it’s just been sitting in the basement since then; at first I forgot why I’d stalled, and after watching the directions I remembered: I don’t have a rivet gun. One text to the Scout mafia later, I had one on loan.
Looking over my spares, I realized that the driver’s frame I was going to use is broken at the top, so I found another frame with a broken hinge mount on the bottom where the pivot pin sits, a common failure point on this design. When I started this project I didn’t have a welder, but now I can simply weld braces to the sides and it’ll be stronger than it was from the factory. I cut two small sections of 18 gauge steel, tacked them in place and then welded them to the frame so it’s sturdy again. After I ground it all down, I brought it back in the house and put it on the workbench. I started working the rubber into the frame and got it ready for the next step: two rivets on the angle side.
Something else I thought I would try was breaking out my tabletop metal brake and seeing if I could bend up the 16 gauge steel I’d cut out for the seat base. I need to take a sharpie and write on the brake itself: “Not good for 16 gauge steel”. The bends were not crisp, and I should’ve stopped at the first one. so I think I’m going to cut out a section of 18 gauge steel in the same pattern and get that ready for Brian’s professional brake.
Sunday morning I met up with Bennett, who was in the area, and we drove outside the beltway a ways to meet up with an old Scout guy who had put the call out for a period radio. Bennett had a 1974 AM unit in his stash and offered it up in the interest of getting the truck in shape. The fellow we met with has a green Scout I haven’t seen in 12 years, back when I sold his son a pair of Terra door windows I’d picked up somewhere. We stood in his garage and chatted for a while, and he showed us his progress. His truck looks very good: a ’74 with an AMC 256, bench seats, in a lovely shade of green. He’s got a bucket list of things he wants to get done, like finally getting a Terra cabtop on it, installing power steering, and some other smaller stuff. Overall, it’s a very clean Scout, and it was great to catch up with him.
Back at home, Bennett helped me diagnose the clutch by pulling the inspection cover off the transmission bellhousing. He looked at the flywheel/clutch while I pushed the pedal. He couldn’t see anything happening, which leads us to believe the two are rusted together. I’m going to try a couple of driveway fixes before I call in the big guns, but I’m pretty much resigned to having a shop look it over.
He had to head out, so after lunch I ran out for a better negative battery cable and replaced the bad one, then filled the carb and cranked it over until the battery started getting sick—which didn’t take long. I’d guess it hadn’t been charging well for a while. The other thing I’m noticing is that the fuel pump isn’t pulling the way it should—but to be fair I haven’t been able to crank it for long enough to get things moving. I’ll try it again this coming week to see if I can get her idling.
Down on the workbench I continued replacing the rubber in the wing windows. Bennett lent me his pop rivet gun, which is essential for doing the bracket on the front of the frame. I got the driver’s side in place and mounted, and found that the top of the window was out of alignment with the frame. After pulling the passenger’s side apart and replacing that rubber, I found the same issue there. So clearly I’m not riveting the bracket in the right place, or the new rubber is just more chonky than the old dried out garbage. More research is required.
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.
Staying Warm
Here’s the video update for the last two weeks. This covers installation of the fuel tank hoses, the cupholder, and tidying up wiring on the aux fuse panel. Then I came back inside and worked on the seat base sheetmetal, gutted the radio from the green Travelall to install a bluetooth receiver, tried to put a new lock in the rear doorhandles, and poured a silicone mold around the dealer badge.
Rearview
The rear view mirror in the Travelall is about as useful as a tax audit. It’s a piece of flat mirror bolted to the roof, aimed back down a steel tube at two windows 15 feet away; there’s basically nothing visible in the tiny amount of reflective space. This is why I sought out and installed west coast mirrors, which will do the heavy lifting of showing me what’s behind the truck.
That being said, I saw an ad for a digital dash cam/rearview mirror on Insta yesterday and bookmarked it for future use: a product called Wolfbox, which includes a forward-facing dash cam and hardwired widescreen rear view camera mounted on a touchscreen that fits over your existing mirror. The more expensive models include stuff like collision protection, parking assistance, and other stuff that would require linking to the car’s computer, but I clearly don’t need that. If I could simply get a rearview dash cam that gave me a better idea of what’s behind me, I’d be very happy.