Scout

[MDEnvEngr]

Hand (re) made. I'll throw up a couple of pics of the start of the restoration of a 1974 Scout we recently acquired. If there is interest I'll keep it going in a high-level sort of way just to show what can be involved. My 14 y/o son is my main helper on this project (or it might be the other way around). I've retored a few cars in the past - a 1969 Caddy and a 73 VW Thing and a Manx) but I'm by no means an expert in this stuff. I do love an involved project, and now that the boy is bigger the chance to work on something together and see his skill develop along the way is the big draw for me. The boy will likely be doing all of thew welding - he's just better at it than I am. I can still out-braze him by a mile, but am no where near the welder. He has been welding the nicely fit perfectly clean chromo bike frame tubes and learning to deal with the wackiness of sheet metal and "not perfect" metal is an interesting challenge for him.

Doesn't look too bad!

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Passenger side floor:

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Working on the removal of the rear floor:

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[MDEnvEngr]

More:

This is the area at the back of the driver's door. The B pillar is not attached to anything. Same with the rocker. And the mid-tub body mount structure is gone. For that matter, 5 of the six tub mounts are bad. the good news is: one of them is good so we have a datum to work from!

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Before we could square and level the tub and put it into traction above the chassis we had to fix some rot in the firewall. Felt good actually patching something, but we have not hit the bottom of the rust removal yet by any means. And a good place for the boy to work on his sheet metal welding - all of this is hidden within the front fender structure.

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This past weeked we spent a good portion of both days squaring up the tub and levelling it and putting jigs at the B and C pillars and braces in the doors so what metal remains stays where it is supposed to be while we are cutting and replacing critical parts of the structure. I do not know what the factory tolerance was for these things back in 1974, but I'd bet it was along the lines of +/- 0.25" at least.

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Along the way we also pulled the engine, tranny, etc. Here is the boy, and this is the kind of enthusiam that makes a project like this fun!

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Thanks for looking! B

[72gmc]

Good on ya!

Why don't you guys live closer to me? I'd roll the old truck right into your queue. I never was taught to do this stuff.

[MDEnvEngr]

We started at the rear of the tub, as locating the rear tub mounts is the easiest of the bunch. We strayed from the original design - we are not thinking of concourse restoration, we are thinking solid driver restoration. Where we have to modify the structure so that we can fabricate it ourselves, or make it stronger, simpler, etc we will. So much of the design of the original structure is influenced by the manufactoring process - exposed pinch seams to allow spot welding for instance. Our intent is to make as much of the patch panels as possible ourselves. It helps that we are on good terms with the metal shop down in town.

We repaired both of the C pillars - luckily the rot was on the wings and we did not have to rebuild the tailgate supports. And then we prepared and welded in a new rear beam. Two of the 6 body mounts are now where they should be!

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[treadonme]

Loving this thread!
We had TONS of fun in both Scouts and Travelalls bitd.

[Bewheels]

Back in the day my father worked for a International Harvester dealership.

Scouts that leaked when it rained were a regular visitor in the service area.
It got to the point where to "solve" the problem, they would drill holes in the floor to let the water out. Looks like yours didn't get that "fix".

[72gmc]

I once shared a house with a physics student who owned a Travelall. It would be in pieces while he did the quarter's school work, then rebuilt, then gone to follow the Dead for a while, then back home, repeat.

[MDEnvEngr]

Not too much progress this week. Weather turned nice the the trails were calling. We did get some of the PS mid-tub mount cut up and patched. We got the rockers notched and welded up. And the boy has had enough of the MIG, so we installed a 240 outlet in the garage so he could bring the TIG machine up from the shop. We found a neat pressure-sensitive finger trigger so that he doesn't have to use the pedal in weird positions - he doesn't like the auto pulse.
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Also a bonus shot of my daughter rolling a (STIL, of course) ledge on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. She's really coming into her own in her senior year - riding hard stuff, and coaching 2 different junior's teams. She'll be headed off to UVM this fall and cannot wait to race with that gang!
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[MDEnvEngr]

Another slow few weeks on the Scout - our main excuse was that we spend April vacation out in Sedona. The kids had never been out west and it was time. Once everyone got used to the fact that everything out there wants to cut you it was all good. We have great trails here in CT (believe it or not) - but we do not have the stunning scenery. It was a great trip, though the airline travel out and back was a nightmare.

Anyway, back at home we got back to the scout. We kept digging through the rust and removing what used to be structure. There is really not much left of the tub. The door posts, the firewall, the tunnel and most of the step. Everything else has been removed or will be removed (the bed sides are still therre for rear mount location purposes but they will be cut out as well. Our one good datum - the PS middle tub mount was just ok. We still needed to rebuild it. So we started there. This weekend we actaully added metal! We installed a new PS rocker. Next up will be the PS front tub mount and then we will have one side of the tub fully supported. We will move to the DS - which is in worse shape than the PS. The aft door post on the DS is gone on the bottom, so we will start at the front, then get the new rocker mocked into position and build the door post "down" to the rocker - at least we have the other side intact for template purposes. It is tedious work, pre-painting anything that is overlapped or will be inaccessible once assembled but that is why these old trucks are so bad: tons of lap joints have for easy factory assembly, but left untreated as they were all of these lap joints quickly turn into rust sammiches.

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[MDEnvEngr]

Sp we've been moving along, slowly. Between tending to the yard and garden, and Mother's Day, and just life in general this project creeps along. But we have made some good progress. In the above photos, the PS rocker was installed. Since then, we have installed the PS front tub mount and finished the PS middle tub mount. We had to re-align the tub a couple of times and spend a lot of time scratching our heads about why what we thought was the center wasnt the center. But I think we have it squared away and it is looking good. The we moved over to the DS and started in on that wasted rear door pillar/mid tub mount rocker junction. We've had a little adjustment to the budget courtesy of the Admiral and we are just going to send all the geared stuff - transmission, tranfer case and diffs/axles to the local off road place and have them go through it all for us. They will stop mid way to allow us to collect the housings and sandblast and either paint or powdercoat. That should save us a couple months of dirty nasty work and allow us to figure out the Megasquirt ECU on the (ahem) Jeep 4.0 engine we are installing.

Front PS tub mount:

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The DS B pillar/middle tub mount/rocker intersection:

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B pillar pieced back together - looking at back side:

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The tub mount section of the step cut out and replacement metal getting fitted:

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The boy on break:

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[MDEnvEngr]

I lost track of this thread and now I have some catching up to do. We continue to work away on the tub. We really are having a good time of it, and working with my son is a lot of fun. At this point I'm not so much mentoring him as I am working alongside him - he has come a long ways in a short time, as kids will do when they are interested in something.

So we finished up the floor supports:

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And then put in the floors:

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And finished up the foot wells:

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To get there we had to repair the tunnel section. There was a lot of cutting and patching and "teaking" the metal into shape. Looking back, I should have replaced larger chunks rather than try to keep a bunch of small patches aligned.

We were pretty excited to get the floors in.

B

[MDEnvEngr]

We then turned our attention to the back half of the tub. On the one hand, things were easier because there was nothing left to mate up to. On the other hand, there was nothing left to mate up to. The only dimension we knew for sure was the 42" between the wheel wells. We have been trying to make as many pieces as possible ourselves, we know that the end product will not pass muster with an IH purist but are not really concerned with that. Replacement panels are expensive, but more importantly a large part of this project is educational in nature.

So we used 14ga treadplate for the floor. We had to honeycomb tthe underside for stiffening:

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And then we used the same material for the front of the step:

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It was about this time that I has to dust off the wire welding skills and start lending a hand. Just the volume of welding that needed to be done was too much for one guy if we wanted to keep things moving along. And I was sick of just doing the grunt work while the boy took all the glory. Anyway, I had to add a 2.5 magnifier to my shield and then attach a couple of penlights to actually see what the heck I was doing. But MIG is easy so long as you can see and my welding mojo was quickly back. Every now and then my wife would come out and see us both hunched over an arc: me on the MIG and the boy on the TIG and just shake her head. We just say that all the effort is worth it to get her a cool old truck to drive around...

[MDEnvEngr]

Wheel wells! Mother Trucking wheel wells! These things would occupy the next month or so (and even now they still need tweaking). We were left with only the inner portion of the curve. And that had to be cut from the original floor in such a way that we lost the bottom 1" or so. There was so many old repairs between the wheelwells and the floor - poor welding, brazing, fiberglass and bondo and silicone sealant - it seems like every repair method known was tried in this area. So we took what remained - like a slice of an orange and created the rest. We had to roll some sheet to make the curve over the top - then weld that to the slice we had. We had to make the bottom flange at the floor. We then had to work the well onto the flange. So, once that was done, this is what we ended up with:

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So much finicky work. But the that wasn't the tough part. We had to enclose the wells and make them mate up with the outer rockers. That was tedious, but instructive. This is where metal work so beats wood work: you can alway cut and redo if necessary. and we found it necessary from time to time.

So, once we got the wheel ells in, the tub was starting to look like something:

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[MDEnvEngr]

With wheel wells underway we were onto the inner bedsides. Again, we wanted to make our own. We knew they wouldn't look stock, but wanted to make them look "stock-esque" so we visited a buddy down in town and borrowed him and his roller to roll some ribs into our sheet metal pieces:

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We had to do it in 2 pieces for each side, and then TIG those together to make the whole side. Once together, I brought the big pieces to work and used the large bending brake to finish them off.

Then we had to install them.

[MDEnvEngr]

Bedside install. So, we had to cut the wheel well area from the full bedside. This proved to be a little tricky because the sides angle outboard at the bottom - and it was hard to know where the top of the side landed on the well. Luckily the boy is smart and figureed it out. Here is the bedside tacked into place and waiting for full welding. You can also see how we enclosed the well and created a flange for the outer quarter to land on:

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Here is a shot of it almost all of the way installed. We decided to put an access hatch in the rear on the PS. The stock bedsides only have the hatch on the DS in order to access the fuel hoses and vent canisters and such. But there is a big void there so we figured we might be able to use it for something in the future. and it will allow us to get in there and Fluid Film the crap out of everything once it is all put together:

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Here is is welded in from the outside:

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And finally the top rail. The original design included a trough on the top of the bedrail which had a seperate piece that layed in the trough to provide a flat surface for the top of land on. The only reason for the trough was to allow a flange for spot welding the rear quarters. As we are welding the quarters on, we do not need this flange and could go with a smooth top rail. We did include the mounts for the hardtop - but do not think we will use it.

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And that brings us to today. We are still working on the D sbedside and should have that in by the end of the week. Then we have some quarter repairs to do. Once down with that we will flip the tub upside down and complete some welding - we did not go crazy welding upside down, so there is a good amount of finish welding to be done. Once that is done the tub will go out and get sandblasted.

Thanks for looking! B

[lumpy]

Wow. That's spectacular. Nice nice work on the bedsides.

[Ras72]

Very nice indeed.
I admire folks with skills such as yours.
Keep the posts coming!

[rydesteel]

Is there such a thing as a like the whole D*mn thread button? Nicely done and the time spent with your son is worth more than Gold.

[MDEnvEngr]

So the end of summer sucked up a bunch of weekends out having fun. And there was a general freakout about the state of our workshop. We really didn't prepare the garage for this project - we rolled it in and went to town. A few weeks ago we looked around and it was a disaster. Sheetmetal and tools and crap everywhere. Our work tables were covered and we were tripping over extension cords and welders, etc. So we hit the pause button and straightened things out. We used some lumber recycled from my Dad's old deck to build a new bench and also put up enough shelving to get all of our crap up off the floor. We also had to make a place to put 3 steamer trunks and a bunch of totes full of my mother-in-law's old crap. It arrived at our place 3 years ago and my wife will get around to selling it off someday.

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We finally got the engine up and on the stand. No, it's not the old 258 inline 6 - its a 2004 jeep 4.0. The 4.0 and the old 258 share the same block. In order to bring that old 258 up close to modern driveablity we were thinking FI, which would mean and intake change and then an exhaust change, and we'd want a new PS pump so we could have hydo-boost brakes, etc. About $3k in engine mods before you even know if the engine that had been sitting for 25 years runs. Or, you pick up a more modern 4.0 with all of the stuff we need for $500 from a fella dropping an LS into his jeep. Now, this move will definitely trigger some of the IH purists, but we don't really care about that - we want a nice driving vehicle. While we are at it we are going to use a newer NV3550 5 speed tranny and a dana 300 transfer case. And another thing we will have to learn: we are going to use a stand-alone ECU called a megasquirt to run the engine - this vehicle is old enough to be exempt from emissions here in CT. The ECU should be quite a challenge - but Mom is an EE that works on control systems for a living, so we should be able to rope her into that part of the project.

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We also got the axles back from sandblasting and got them painted up:

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And in a shameless plug: that Caddy in the background is for sale. Really - how many old convertables does a family need? And that thing takes up some barn space! I've been trying to sell it via FB marketplace and CL, etc but no bites at all. Perhaps the big Caddies are out of favor now.

And this week we are back on the Scout for real. We're working on the remaining bedside and the rear quarters. We are very close to having the tub "done". I think this weekend - then we'll take it off the chassis and flip it over and work on finish welding the baootma nd preping it for paint. Some patching and such here:

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In other news, the boy's reputation got out and the fellas down at the local hotroad/jeep mod/rockcrawler shop told him to come on down and see what's up - they are cool dudes doing cool stuff (like swapping a 850 HP LS-1 into an Infinity, or creating an autocross monster from an old F100, etc - not your normal change-the-oil-in-the-Camry shop). It wasn't long before they saw he was useful and he's been down there a couple of days/week ever since. He's learning all sorts of things and really enjoying himself. A great oppurtunity for him - he's beyond my ability to mentor in most things now. Here he is welding up an exhaust on the owner's drag truck:

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Anyway, not too much to show for the last 4 weeks, but now that school is back in session and we are generally home on most weekends, the pace should pick back up. Thanks for looking - Bob

[MDEnvEngr]

We've "finished" the tub - so next weekend we will take it back off the chassis and flip it over. We then have to finish weld a bunch of things - we didn't go crazy upside down welding. Then it'll be clean and scrape and sand and paint the underside. But that will be next weekend. This is what it looks like now, with both bedsides installed:

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Meanwhile we have been tackling some outer body work. Not so much of it to do, as compared to the tub. But it's more finicky and much more visible. It takes patience. Careful fitting of the patches. Tacking then planishing the tacks then more tacking and more planishing, etc. Then there might be some tapping with strange looking hammers to get the contours right. Definitely a skill that takes some practice. We are getting better - but it'll probably take the whole project before we are "good".

We had a total of 6 patches on the PS rear quarter. We used one purchased patch panel on the lower rocker forward of the wheel, and made the rest of them ourselves. Here's a patch on the front of the quarter, near the B pillar:

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That one went pretty well, but ended up being a little "flat", so we had to tap it with one of those wierd hammers to get the shape right. We put a nice curve on the forward edge with the shrinker, but we should have made sure that that curve continued all the way across the patch.

This next one was more complicated, in that the patch was curved in multiple planes. We used the fender as a guide before we cut the old metal out. We made the patch in two pieces: the fender lip and the outer body piece. We used the fender as a jig to tack them together an then finish welded on the bench. Then cut out the old metal and got to it:

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We were very happy with this one. There are still a couple of underfilled spots, but that is just a zap of MIG.

Good times! Thanks for looking. Bob & Finn