Category: Travelall

Fall To-Do List

Now that the roof project has pretty much wrapped up, I’m turning my attention to the next tasks to tackle. Keeping a list handy will keep me focused on the right stuff. I do have a tendency to wander so I want to make sure I’m working on things in the right order and staying on task. Given that it’s September and the weather is starting to get colder, I’ve got to hustle to get some final things done before I’m unable to. So here’s a list in rough order of importance:

  • Continuing work on the wiring: I’ve got to chase down the problem with the turn signals, add a dome light, add a license plate light and see if I can rig up some reverse lights. Oh, and maybe I can scab a radio in place.
    • 10.12: the turn signals are back! One of the connections on the temp gauge came loose.
    • 11.10: License plate light is mounted and working.
  • Continuing to troubleshoot the clutch issues: I’m sure there’s more adjustment I can make to the clutch to get it to engage; I have to figure out what that might be and re-bleed the brakes again.
  • Cleaning off and painting the headliner bows: The ones I’ve got are good but covered in surface rust. I have to get them cleaned up and prepped for gray paint.
  • Steering wheel repair: My brother-in-law scored me a very old and very tired wheel from a yard up in New York State. I’ve seen other folks online effect repairs with two-part epoxy and fancy OEM-grade paint; I’m going to take a whirl at this when the snow is flying and see how well I can make it work.
  • Adjusting the front doors: Both of them have some sag. I tend to believe this is from the hinges needing work; further investigation is required. Luckily, I’ve got spare hinges from the Green truck that I can disassemble and refurbish without taking the Red truck apart.
  • Building out an aluminum roof rack: I’ve got some basic plans for how I’d like to construct a rack for the back 3/4 of the truck, but I’ve got to do some calculations for how I’d construct it to bear the weight of things like a rooftop tent, spare tire, and/or solar panels. I’m thinking that I’d rent a TIG welder and get some basic aluminum and do a bunch of practice welding before I go nuts with this, but it’s definitely on the list.
  • Send out the spare hood, 4 doors, and inner fenders for sandblasting: The hood on the red bus is covered in three thick coats of paint, but I’ve got a green hood sitting behind the garage that would swap in very easily. The passenger doors are in very rough shape outside; now that I’m more comfortable with shooting paint, I would love to get the rear passenger door broken down, stripped of paint and ready for IH Red.

Completed:

  • Building out the bench seats: This is a primary project for the winter. It’s going to take some time and effort to get both seats covered in foam and built, and I have to do some quick work to the frames to clean them up before going to fabric.
    • 11.1: Foam ordered!
    • 11.17: I’ve got all of the materials, and I’m ready to start on the upholstery process.
    • 12.1: The rear bench seat is complete.
    • 12.11: Seats are complete and mounted.
  • Removing the insulation on the roof & adding sound deadener: Now that the roof is covered, the nasty, thin fiberglas that was glued to the inside roof needs to come down. This is going to be a dirty, messy job and I’m not looking forward to it, but I’d rather do it in the fall when I can wear a Tyvek suit and stay warm as opposed to sweating out a hot July afternoon. The goal is to get things as smooth as possible so I can replace it all with sound deadener/insulator.
    • 11.17: Insulation is gone. The roof is wire-wheeled and ready for paint.
    • 11.24: Sound deadener is installed.
  • Weatherstripping: I’ve got to replace it on the front two doors now that the rears are done. And the barn doors need some love pretty quickly, too.
      • 11.1: Front doors are complete.
  • Mounting the mirrors: I’m going to weld threaded studs to the tops of the doors that I can use to mount the mirrors without drilling through them; this way none of the hardware will interfere with the weatherstripping on the other side. The bottom bolt holes still exist from the original mirror set.
    • 9.8: The mirrors are mostly mounted and just need some finishing work.
    • 9.15: Mirror brackets are mounted, but I need to fix the mounting post on one of them.
    • 11.10: Both mirrors are mounted and complete.
  • Matching paint and painting the door cards/heater: I need to get the heater re-installed pretty quickly, so this one is high on the list. There’s a place locally that can match and mix automotive enamel, so I think this will be the priority in the next couple of weeks—before the weather really gets cold.
    • 9.8: The paint is matched and shot. I still need to spray clear coat over this.
    • 9.15: Clear coat is sprayed.
  • Re-installing the heater box: this will be one of the priorities in the next couple of weeks; I want to get the whole thing put back together before it gets real cold, test it out, and make sure all the moving parts work.
    • 10.12: the heater box is finished and installed; all cables are connected and the box is wired back into the panel.
  • Rekeying the door locks: I’m going to pull the locks out of the green spare doors and see if I can get spare barrels to put inside so that I can actually lock the truck.
    • 9.15: Door locks are pulled from all four doors, and new tumblers are on their way. I do need new retainer clips though, which are very pricy. Maybe I can steal one from a spare Scout II door…
    • 10.12: Door locks are installed and working. That took some doing, but it’s done!
  • Testing out the radio: Speaking of, I’ve got a stock 1967 radio from the Green Truck that may or may not work. I’d like to put it in the Red Bus but not if it doesn’t work.
    • 9.8: this is actually a Ford product from the mid-60’s, so it’s not original. Still, it would be cool to use a period-correct radio. We’ll see.
  • Adjusting the barn doors to close properly: the passenger side door doesn’t like to latch, so I’ve got to sort this out. And it’s the one with the lock.
    • 9.15: I took a look at this and have it closing better now. It’s not perfect but it closes.
Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Fall To-Do List  |  Posted in Future Plans, To-Do List, Travelall

Painting and Maintenance

I think the roof project on the Travelall is done. I scuffed and wet-sanded the first coat of paint on Sunday with 1500 grit paper, which basically knocked the shine down. From there I hit it with a tack cloth and prepped the tent for shooting paint. Because I was so wiped out from a trip to my FiL’s place on Saturday I didn’t really have the energy to do much more—I did re-splice the second wire off the large bulkhead connector to restore my marker lights but not the flashers, and I spent some time sanding and fixing the shitty peeling clearcoat and scratches on the drivers rear quarter panel. Those got a coat of rattle can international red which should keep them covered and protected for the time being.

Monday morning I put the tarps up around the ghetto tent, taped and papered off the entire truck, and got everything ready to shoot the second coat of white paint. I used more of it on the first coat that I had for the second, so I had to be careful in my application. I was able to cover the entire roof starting from the middle section out and I think I got good coverage. I probably could have dialed the gun in a little bit better – if I had a little more paint, I would have dialed it thicker. I think the air/paint mixture was a little too dry, and so it went on with a little more texture than it should have. But the whole thing is covered and I’m happy to have that part of the project behind me. I’m going to see how it weathers over the winter, and if it’s really sloppy and looks bad, I’ll wet sand the whole thing again, buy another can of the paint, and spray a solid second coat over it.

While that was drying, I turned my attention to the Scout. I drove it out of the garage over a tarp and pulled the fill plug out of the transmission. Nothing came out, so I drained the entire case. Then I dug out my fill pump and my last two cans of 50W racing oil. After pumping both of those into the case, it’s pretty clear there wasn’t 3 1/2 quarts still in it—I’m actually quite certain of that. Nobody had 50 weight racing oil around here locally so I ordered some from Amazon, which should be here on Wednesday. The next thing I’ve gotta find is a new PCV valve to replace the one on the truck. If that’s clogged, the pressure inside the crankcase was too high, and it may have blown the seal out of the back end of the transmission. But, I’m going to fill the case and drive it a bit to see if it’s still leaking very badly.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Painting and Maintenance  |  Posted in Paint, Travelall

Regasketed

On Wednesday I had the guy who installed the new (used) passenger side glass come back out to replace the gasket on the driver’s side rear glass. I didn’t have him do it last year because I didn’t have a replacement for the glass, but now that I’ve got spares for each side it was definitely time to get this done. He remembered everything except for the fact that it gets roped in from the inside, but even so the job went quickly and we had it installed in under an hour.

What also helped was the fact that the metal edge was in almost perfect shape all the way around the truck—with the exception of one dime-sized spot of surface rust the entire thing was clean metal. Just to be careful I washed it all down and sprayed the bottom edge with IH red Rust Stop and let it cure overnight.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Regasketed  |  Posted in Progress, Travelall

Shiny White

What you’re seeing there is a coat of Bright White 2-stage auto enamel on the roof of the Travelall about an hour after shooting it last night. Overall it went on very smoothly—I dialed in the gun pretty quickly and had it laying down a clean pattern, but I didn’t use the drywall stilts to move around. They proved to be cheap junk, so they are going back for a refund. I think the paint went on pretty evenly but most likely I’m going to wet-sand the whole thing and shoot the second half of the can on the center section just to be as thorough as possible.

Today (Wednesday) I have the guy from the glass installer coming back to re-install the driver’s side window with a new gasket, so after I’d shot the roof I had Jen help me take out the glass, which went quickly now that we’ve done it four times. The steel around the window edge is in absolutely fantastic shape—I only had to sand rust out of two dime-sized spots. Seriously, it looks like it just rolled out of the factory. I used a nylon sander to remove all the adhesive on the inside edges, washed all of the dirt off the outside edge, and sprayed a coat of IH rattle-can red around the bottom lip. Keep your fingers crossed for a successful installation today. It’s supposed to be 95˚ so hopefully the heat will be on our side.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Shiny White  |  Posted in Paint, Travelall

Primer and Paint

I took the week before Finn went back to school off and visited my family in New York. Returning home to get her ready for school, I spent a good part of Friday finishing the wiring work in the truck.

Saturday’s progress wound up being two steps forward and one step back. Actually, on Friday, I had most of the day to fool around with the dashboard and finishing up the electrical work, so I put the big rubber grommet on the bulkhead connector and tried to get it through the bulkhead. I want having to take the entire hood off so that I could sit on the air cleaner and work a screwdriver around the edges of the grommet along with a whole lot of dish soap in order to get it through the metal. Then hooked all of the connections back up and noticed that there were some really crappy spices on a couple of the wires so I broke out the electrical gear and cleaned those up with proper splices and heatshrink tube. Unfortunately, when I tested the electrical, I found that my turn signals are not functioning anymore.

I fooled around with the wiring for another half an hour to try to get the signals to light back up, but decided to pivot to the roof in order to get it ready for paint. Last year I spent a lot of time sanding out all of the rust spots and dents, filling them with body filler, and sanding everything smooth. It had a coat of rattle-can primer over top of everything but as we all know primer collects water and I wasn’t able to get it painted before things got cold. So the whole thing sat under a car cover all winter and spring. Looking at it this summer, I noticed that some of the filler was bubbling and there were some rust areas coming through, so I got out the grinder and cleaned out all of those areas and refilled them.

While those areas were drying, I cleaned up the sections of sheet metal under the drip reel, and around the back doors. I had to make the ghetto tent even more ghetto by lifting it off the ground with cinderblocks, in order to be able to work on the edges of the roof. A couple of inexpensive Harbor Freight LED lights hung from the center post made things easier to see. I also figured it would be very difficult to drag something around to stand on the entire time I was painting, but I was annoyed to find you can’t rent drywall stilts anywhere around me. So I ordered a set of cheap stilts from Amazon. That way I can raise myself up 24 to 36 inches and simply walk around the truck while I’m spraying it. Unfortunately they didn’t come the day they were promised, and showed up on the porch three hours after I had sprayed the top with fancy enamel-based primer.

The painting process went both better and worse than I was expecting. With the white paint I bought for the roof I got a midrange HPLV gun for solvent-based paint. I’ve had a bunch of experience with an HPLV gun shooting latex paint on the house, so I knew most of the ins and outs of how to get the gun working the way I wanted. Mixing the paint was a new challenge though, and dealing with oil-based materials made cleanup a bit trickier, but the paint went on pretty smoothly and now I have an idea of how much to mix for the entire roof of the truck.

It’s supposed to be sunny for the next two days and then damp and rainy for a stretch after that, so I’m going to try to sand it down this evening and prep it for shooting white paint on Wednesday evening if I can really hustle. Having the roof painted will free up a lot of other things, and I won’t have to worry about keeping things covered so much anymore.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Primer and Paint  |  Posted in Paint, Travelall

I See The Light

I’m continuing to make slow progress on the electrical system in the truck. At first all I had was a starting truck with most of the panel lights working. After replacing more of the connectors, I was able to get headlights and taillights working, as well as the right rear blinker. There’s some kind of short in the left side preventing it from blinking—indeed, using the blinker on that side kills the light completely. And screwing the dash panel into the dash itself killed one of the dash lightbulbs that originally was working.

I pulled a front marker pot from the green truck stash and another from a pile of cheap parts I got at Nats, and tested them out on the bench. The grimy unit from the green truck worked so I hooked that to the truck and tried it out, with no success. I’m going to have to pull the circuit tester out next to see if there’s any power getting out there at all.

I’m still waiting on the firewall grommets, so I switched to doing some light bodywork on the driver’s door, grinding a bunch of rusty spots out and cleaning all of the residual holes left from various mirrors. I put the copper magnet behind the largest of the holes and welded them all up. After a coat of body filler, I sanded them smooth and got them covered with rattle-can IH red.

Meanwhile, I got the Scout ready for our trip west. I stocked up on consumables—oil, coolant, various fluids, belts, and other stuff. I pulled out my milspec snap kit and added a pair of snaps to each side of the door bar flaps on my original Kayline top to keep it from flying away on the highway. With a quick wash and topoff on fluids, we’re ready to hit the road on Thursday.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on I See The Light  |  Posted in Travelall, Video

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   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on It Works  |  Posted in Electrical, Travelall

Heater Box, Take 2

Here’s a progress report on the Travelall heater box. When I last left off, I had welded two patches into the bottom and the corner of the box and head ground down all the welds so that the metal looked pretty clean.

The next step was to put some filler on the metal and try to smooth things out. The first coat went on roughly and I sanded things down to figure out where the hotspots were. Using the hammer and dolly I knocked a couple of high points down and straightened a major valley in between the old metal and the new metal that had formed when everything got really hot during the welding. With that straightened out, it was easy to put a second coat of mud on things and get things smoothed out better. Over the course of Saturday afternoon I was able to get a final coat of mud on things and smooth it out to the point where hitting it with 1500 grit sandpaper has it looking really clean.

As you look at the photo above, you’re actually seeing the box upside-down; the welds on the side will be mostly hidden by the A-pillar wall and the curved section will be under the passenger’s feet. Barely any of this will be visible, but how it looks matters to me, so I’ll keep working on it.

The next order of business was to officially test the blower motor out. The wire leads are shielded so it’s hard to get test leads inside the plastic, so I found an orphan pigtail with an old Packard male lead at the end and used that to make a solid connection. When that was hooked up the blower motor came right to life, and each of the hot leads (one is for high-speed, the other for low) worked as advertised. So I cleaned up the blower cage, greased the spindle, and put that aside for re-assembly. Having already rebuilt a Scout II heater box, that experience has been super-useful with this one because I know exactly what I’m getting into and I have 9/10 of the parts needed to finish this one properly.

Looking ahead to August and Harvester Homecoming, I wanted to address something that’s been on my mind for a while: a proper cleanup of the cooling system on the Scout. I’d drained it when I put the radiator in but never actually flushed out the block, so I had the folks at Jiffy Lube down the street handle that for me—for the extra money I figured it would be a lot more environmentally friendly than just dumping it out in my driveway. From there I headed down to the Eastwood store in Pasadena to get a new bottle of Rust Converter and found they were having a car show out in the parking lot. There were a ton of immaculately restored Camaros and Corvettes and the odd bubble-top Chevrolet; a couple of beautiful lowered Beetles represented the import crowd. I heard several people call out the Scout as I pulled my junk up just outside the ribbon tape, and went in to get my supplies.

The truck ran super-cool the whole time I was on the road; the only time the temp gauge climbed was while I was waiting in some traffic on 695 and even then it wasn’t too bad. She definitely likes to keep moving to keep air flowing, which is no big surprise.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Heater Box, Take 2  |  Posted in Radiator, Travelall