Category: Travelall

I’ve had an idea for a T-shirt design bubbling in my head for a while now, and while I was working on video editing (and waiting for files to render) last week, I put it together in Illustrator:  a profile view of a Travelall with the script I’ve already built underneath. This time I built two designs—one for light-colored shirts and one for dark, which is more work but avoids a pet peeve of mine, when printers just reverse out a design in white and the negative spaces aren’t correctly negative. The other big leap I took was to post it up in a couple of Travelall-specific groups on Facebook, the first time I’ve posted there (other than Marketplace) in years. Within 24 hours I sold seven shirts and got two requests for custom truck colors and one for a coffee mug, which was easy to do because of the way I set the file up.

Here’s to hoping the orders keep coming in; I think I might do a Scout II next—until the VW group sends me a cease-and-desist.

I stumbled upon an original 1963 Operator’s Manual for the Travelall on eBay before Christmas but passed on it because I thought the price was too high; eBay contacted me after New Year’s and told me the seller had dropped the price dramatically so I jumped on it. It stinks of cigarettes and old man but it’s in fantastic shape otherwise, and as a time capsule it’s a lot of fun.

In the meantime I went out to warm up the Scout and see if I could get the Travelall running as well. After some initial tests I filled the carb bowl and shot it with starting fluid, and it coughed to life briefly. I noticed that nothing was reaching the fuel filter above the fuel pump, so I threw some gas in the tank and tried it again. This time it ran choppily for about a minute before it starved out again, so I dumped the rest of my gas in the tank and tried one more time with the battery power I had left. Clearly the gas in the tank has evaporated out—I’ve only got the cap to a spray can covering the inlet tube—so I’ll go get some more gas and fill it up before I try it again.

Baltimore has its own peculiar accent, and I have spent the last thirty years perfecting my impression of its odd mixture of southern, West Virginian, DelMarVan and redneck patois which makes oil sound like oll and sink sound like zink and leads to interesting sentences like Dose crabs smell turrble, lake dere spereled. Amboolamps is a favorite of the Lockardugan household and we use it whenever we can, along with po-leese and farfarter.

In any case, this Travelall ambulance showed up on Marketplace last week to be parted out, and I contacted the seller to see if any of the sheet metal was worth saving; he told me it was all junk. If it had been closer it would have been worth a road trip up just to look over (and possibly to save the rear set of doors for spares) but Massachusetts is too far away to entertain that idea and I think he wants to sell the whole thing together.

The interesting thing here is that additional section they installed between the two doors to lengthen the truck—from the looks of things that metal was some of the first to start breaking down. This would have been an amazing truck to save about ten or fifteen years ago. Dat’sa shayme, hon. 

So stock rear curved windows are impossible to get as it is. Where was this fellow planning on buying his? Priced at $2750 on Craigslist.