1967 800, Portland OR.

[One800]

Before I left the home of the previous owner with my new Scout, he handed me a oddly shaped piece of metal. This metal had been torched from the passenger side rear quarter panel of a donor Scout. "Here, you might need this" he said.

When it was time to begin preserving my Scout had a sneaking suspicion that there might be some real rust hiding on the passengers side. But looking at the above pictures you cant really see a trace of it.

My first line of business was to give it a good look-see. I knew that these things liked to rot the rear quarter panels. After taking a closer look with a flashlight I personally discovered why they rot. IH managed to engineer the perfect rock and mud trap. Sandwiched between the fuel tank and the skin of the quarter panel is a cozy little nook just right for geological collections.

I blasted away at this concrete tough slab like the hydraulic miners of the California Gold Rush. I was hopping a few nuggets would wash out but no such luck. Gobs of rock and sand covered my driveway. It looked just like the Mississippi delta from an airplane window.

Pine needles were also plentiful. I could have wove a sweater with them all. I'm thinking I might call this old Scout Needles!!

So Once the 3 layers of bondo were chipped off I spotted the bad spots and here are some of the photos of my rust repair to the drivers side.














I didnt want to use mud to finish this job, but my welding skills were beginning to warp the sheet metal. I took my time but had to settle for a little mud. Not pictured in these photos is the inner fender well cavity. After removing rust scale and dirt I painted every inch I could reach with Por 15 in hopes that the rust wont return so soon.

Inner fender wells are also in the works later this year.

I'll post the passenger side in just a moment.

Thanks

[One800]

The passengers side was cleverly covered up with a skilled bondo craftsman. The only hint that bondo was even present was the solid dull thud a knuckle makes when striking a plaster cast or a piece of fire wood. Chipping away the layers was interesting, because I discovered that thick bondo does not cure properly. The center section of the bondo wall was still some what soft and smelled fresh.

That quarter panel had some hard luck. Bashed against rocks and also rotten. So I plotted a line and cut the whole thing off. After all I had a custom piece much larger than I needed, so I could afford to do this job right.

NOTE TO SELF: Before cutting off the lower half of your quarter panel check the quality of your donor panel first. After sanding off the paint I realized that this piece of metal was fairly rusty too.





As you can see, the fuel compartment box was a goner, so I did some flat metal repairs there first.



Above you can see the patch panel with it's patches. The leading 1/4 of my awesome patch panel had to be cut off. And you can see the other two spots which had to be cut away. The metal had a few pin holes but the back side was so pocked I was sure that other holes would bust through just as I finished my work, so thats the reason I had to make such big patches in my patch panel.



I used my new air tool which puts a small crimp into the steel. This was handy but not perfect. My tool only crimps about 1”-2” long, and trying to maintain a perfect straight light is hard.

Also you probably spotted that there is some paint left in a small dent. I really don’t want to cover up the dents on this machine. I thought that since I cut off a huge dent I could afford to have a small dent in its place, even though it is not truly my Scout’s dent. Plus it would look pretty odd to the trained IH Scout Owner’s eye if they saw a Scout with perfect quarter panels and dents elsewhere. So in order to make this repair invisible I kept the dents in place hoping to draw the eye away from the bad weld / mud job to focus on the dent. The old Bait and Switch ploy. Aha!



More in my next posting.

[One800]

Judging from the amount of sand, rock, grass, mud and other debris, I could see with one eye that this machine had been out and about. Even after blasting the layers away I still found more pockets of hidden sediment.

When I first checked out the Scout I noticed some blistered paint just below and above the fresh air vent.



When I removed the front fenders to get a look from the other side I thought that the air ducts were the cause. There were 10’s of inches of dried layers stacked upon these ducts. But after blasting that stuff away I realized that the problem was not the ducting but the door hinge perches themselves.





Time, moisture and rust had managed to pack the void between the kick panel and the hinge mount. The rust was both above and below the hinge spot welds so I new that I’d have to remove the hinge mounts to get at the rust and do a good job at repairing them.



Fresh air is not a big problem on a machine which has a removable top. And the wing windows on a Scout are almost 3 feet long. So while I made some repairs to this area I made the decision to leave the ducts off when I made my final patches.

I did retain the louvers so that the interior still looked stock. The advantage to removing these bulky things was simple. Less crap would build up, easier to blast clean and more air could circulate to dry things off.



After making my first patches I noticed some other rust which was located at the union between the firewall and the inner fender. Once finished I painted on several layers of rust-o-leum to fill in any pin holes I might have missed , protect the new metal and allow junk to slide off.



The great news is that I didn’t screw up the location of my door hinge mounts. Just a little monkey motion was needed to get my doors hung properly. And I did finish that spot at the very bottom, so that I could anchor my fender properly.

More in the next post.

[One800]

While the doors were off I patched them up. I made better water drains too.



I also removed the windows, cleaned up the metal frames and painted them. Cleaned up the tracks and rewelded the small bolts which mount through the door.

[One800]

The previous owner installed a Scout II power brake booster. The battery was located on the drivers side too. The master cyl. Just touched the battery and was causing a rub mark in the body of the battery. Not to happy with the thought of a ruptured battery I began to think of how I could better use the space under the hood.

Winters are long and cold in Montana but it’s a dry cold. So the original owner probably didn’t need to de-fog his windows every single morning. In Portland Oregon winter is the exact opposite, it’s mild (35-40 average) and it’s wet.

Cool + wet + leaky Scout = super foggy windows and the heater just wasn’t cutting it. Don’t suggest Fog-X either, that stuff works to a point, but in Portland that point ends somewhere in Mid September.

The Scout heater box is pretty large and there is no way to re-circulate warmed air already in the drivers cabin. The Scout is almost like driving an air cooled VW Bus. The air which finally makes it to the windshield is barely warm…at least that is how my Scout was.

After doing some measurements I realized that I could remove the box, cut it down and mount it under my dash. It kills the glove box, but mine didn’t have one to begin with.





These two photos are the only ones I have of this project. The fan motor is now in and I only had to shape the dash just a bit for it to fit w/ 1/8” of clearance all around. The part that you cant see in the top photo is the foot vents for both passenger and driver.

The second photo shows how I plumbed the water lines to the heater. This photo makes it appear that the hoses are in the passengers foot well. But they are not. They are well above any feet. Also not pictured is a light weight shield I made to protect these hoses from getting snagged.

When sitting in the passengers seat you don’t even see the heater or the motor. Its pretty cool. The air is collected at the back of the firewall. All air comes from within the cabin so this heater warms up pretty quickly and really blows hot.

The added bonus of removing the heater box from the engine compartment is this.



Now my battery sits up against the firewall, closer to the starter. I’m getting better performance from my starter now too.

More to come.

[One800]

When I began to convert from vacuum wipers to electric I thought that I’d tackle a problem which was related to the heater box too.

My wipers were going to be conventional style; single central motor and inner wiper arms connected to the motor. The old heater duct (trough) was going to be in the way and it also didn’t work very well.

So while my dash was off I worked up some new heater ducts. These ducts direct the air to the part of the window which needs to be defogged first, not down in the corner or over to the side, but in line with my eyeballs.

Another important idea was to direct the heater ducts away from the swinging arms. After some playing around with my shop vac in blow mode I came up with a design that fit and worked good.

These new ducts are tapered at the ends. If the ducts remained the same shape to the end, I’d loose pressure at the end, so by tapering these ducts I still get good volume blowing over my windshield even at the ends. I also rebuild the metal between the ash tray and the glove box. That metal is thin and was broken on my machine.





More in a bit.

[One800]

The latest upgrade I’ve done is an electric wiper conversion. I didn’t take many photos of this, so I don’t have much to share, but I can give you and idea of how I took on this idea.

NOTE: when getting an electric wiper motor from your local bone yard keep these important factors in mind.

1. Have the motor tested to make sure it works before you leave. Simply hooking it up to a battery should do the trick.

2. Make sure that you select a motor which has two speeds, regular and fast.

I did not do either of those two things!

First off I took a look at many motors and realized that most wiper motors are large. I have a limited amount of space under my dash so size was important.

I happened across an Isuzu Trooper with a rear window wiper. That motor was nice a small, had an auto park feature and was in primo condition. I snagged it.



Once at home I realized that my motor was not able to do two speeds. (I can make it do two speeds by adding in two circuits. One circuit is full 12 volts and the second circuit has a resistor to provide the motor with less than 12 volts. But that sucks! I don’t want slow and regular speeds ).

But anything was better than my vacuum wipers so I went ahead with the project anyway.



The old ducts from the heater turned out to be great for my motor mount. I cut it down, welded in some nuts for the motor and some bolts to mount to through the firewall.



Then the fun part began.

I had some left over Ford Falcon wiper arms from my Ranchero project. I removed my vacuum wiper motors and saved them (their valuable and work just fine, if all else failed I’d still be able to return to stock.

I fabed up some wiper arm nubs (the part the outer wiper arm fits onto) These nubs work just like the vacuum units with a roll pin holding the splined gear in place. Inside the Scout I welded on a flat piece of metal to act as the arm. Added some ball joints from the Falcon, and now I had side to side action.

I then mounted the motor and fooled around with angles and connections to the motor.



This final image shows my mock up. I used wood to mock up the connections. Trial and error over several days soon found an acceptable wiper movement on the windshield and no binding under the dash. I then made metal versions of these and welded them to my Falcon arms.

The only disadvantage to this design is that my wipers do not rest horizontal, they are angled a bit. But I get a full sweep and they move at the same pace.
Later I’ll get a two speed motor and pray to God that I can retain all of this hard work for a simple swap.

Wish me luck.

….

That’s as much as I have right now. I just covered about 1 years worth of work done on my weekends and evenings. Much more still needs to be done, and I’ll share that progress with you at that time.

I hope to learn more about my Scouts history and when I do I’ll share that too.

Thanks much.

[Comanche Scott]

Great progress!

The mods look great, as does the workmanship.

Scott

[AndyJ]

I guess I always assumed the wiper speed was controlled by some sort of rheostat. Could you route it through a dash dimmer switch? Volvo 240s have a pretty ambiguous looking dash mounted dimmer. Probably would take a 800 dash knob too.

[One800]

Originally Posted by AndyJ

I guess I always assumed the wiper speed was controlled by some sort of rheostat. Could you route it through a dash dimmer switch? Volvo 240s have a pretty ambiguous looking dash mounted dimmer. Probably would take a 800 dash knob too.

After Looking at the wiper motor on my truck, I realized that the motor houses a resisitor. My Trooper motor is either wired in a way that makes the motor run at NORMAL speed, or it has a resistor built in to reduce it's speed to a NORMAL rear wiper speed.

I dont think that I'll really miss high speed wipers, but then again I live in Oregon. I might have the dash back off in a few months. hahaha