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.
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.
This is only five of them. The one on the bottom right weighs a ton.
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.
The spare is on the right. Notice the difference in the float bowl, gas inlet, and bracketry hanging off the left side.
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.
Welding up a bracket on the old wing window.
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.
that mushy bend on the left is why I need a full-size metal brake.
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.
The beginning of the carnage pulling the passenger window apart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brake test
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.
