No-Name '73 Scout II

[Cowtron]

I suppose it's time to stop being a creeper and post up a thread! We have a 1973 Scout II with the 304

the "story" as it relates to the Scout is not all that exciting, but I can fluff it up a little. Feel free to skip ahead.

I sold my big '66 Chevy longbed in 2013 in hopes of finding a smaller, more outdoorsy type of truck. I thought I had the perfect candidate in a '86 Bronco I found. Not the case. The Bronco turned out to be a complete nightmare with a smog issue that I could never get fixed, old computer system that was on the fritz, and various po "fixes" poking out everywhere I looked. Dejected and disappointed with the Bronco, feeling a deep sense of regret and missing the simplicity of my old Chevy, I decided the only way to fill a hole in your heart left by one truck is with another truck!

So in September of '14 I hit the classifieds for a while until we found a guy in the high desert who was looking to sell his brother's Scout project, which was collecting dust and black widows in his driveway. I've always liked the Scout II.

It was running, but barely, and the brakes were in no shape to drive down the steep I-15 grade from the high desert to the inland empire, which goes from about 3,200ft elevation to 1,600. He was the nicest guy, his family was really cool, and he even brought the price of the truck down to foot the towing cost to get it home!

After we got it home, I took it for one spin a couple blocks away, and that's the last time I drove it. I cleaned it out and found some rust in the bed, to go along with the face-sized holes in the quarter panels. Apparently before the desert life, this truck was living in the mountains of big bear, where the snow had clearly taken its toll on the underside. Pics to come of the rust carnage.

We started tinkering trying to get the 304 running strong. There was a suspicious knocking coming from the #5 cylinder. Since we weren't really married to the idea of keeping the IH power, we decided to halt on the 304 and start prepping to replace it with another engine. Could just be something minor, but what the heck. At this point we are pretty committed to doing a sbc swap, and that's where she sat for 6 months waiting for the Bronco to sell. Tbc...

 

[Cowtron]

Whilst waiting for the Bronco to sell, I did do a switcheroo and steal the 32" bfgs I bought for the Bronco to put on the Scout. Scout has 0 clearance for that size tire, so she's going to need a lift before we go anywhere:

Earlier this month somebody finally came by and accepted the Bronco for all its flaws, and took it away! So now that we have some cash to play with, the Scout is getting some lovin'.

This the first time I've ever attempted fixing up an old truck, so I can't wait to learn from you guys and hear y'alls opinions as this build goes. Most of what we have done so far is "monkey see, monkey do" from various places online. We have a 3-man team for most things, so hopefully we can keep each other alive somehow.

We started with the fenders Saturday afternoon, after seeing lots of guys on the internet start there, I figured we should too!

hood off, lights out. That was the easy part:

Got the grill off next. Not too bad, but some of those bolts were pretty tough:

Side fenders came off next, and we finally got to see the condition of what's underneath. I was pleasantly surprised to see there isn't too much rot where this piole of crud had accumulated:

We worked until about 11:30pm that night, and ended up here:

That's where it stands currently! I hadn't really taken pics with a build thread in mind, so from here out I'll remember to document a bit better. I'll also have to remember to take off the license plate before taking more pics (n00b).

 

[punjig]

http://I.imgur.com/iyldaxq.jpg[/img]

That must be standard equipment off of the assembly line for IH scouts, mine came with the same pile of crap!:d

 

[Cowtron]

I'm fairly certain that's "speed crap," which increases hp by 100

 

[Cowtron]

Went through and got some shots of the rust we're going to be up against. This is all in the front half. The floor behind the back seat is rotted out around the wheel wells, but I've got a bunch of parts and misc. Crap back there so I skipped the photos in that area for now.

Passenger body mount wedge... Or what's left of it...

Passenger floor braces. They seem like they might clean up ok...

Driver side body mount wedge, totally shot...

Driver rocker & a little bit of the rear quarter panel, gonna need replacing as well...

Same area with the door open. The passenger side doesn't seem to have gotten as much abuse as the driver, though I have yet to pull up the mat on that side...

Here's a shot of the floor, after I vacuumed quite a bit out :/

Custom floor option, these were installed standard so you could tell if you were driving over the line, right?

Custom storage option in the rear quarter panel...

.... should probably learn to weld soon

 

[Cowtron]

Started up with a little bit of sanding on the grill last night. The whole front of the truck is totally peppered with these awesome little chips:

After about an hour of sanding, got around one headlight area and a couple rungs across, but I'm still left with little black remnants of the chips:

I'm curious as to whether those are still specks of rust, or just discoloration from what appears to be the dark colored primer jammed into the metal from rocks? I'm hesitant to keep going at it with the sander for fear of screwing it up, I might look up some blasting prices in the area. One of the powder coating places I was looking at also offers blasting at an hourly rate.

 

[FDChappie]

Before you learn to weld perhaps you might learn to sand blast. I'm guessing you're going to find a lot of bondo in those rear quarter panels from previous rust fixes. Fortunately most of the parts are available in the store here.

 

[Cowtron]

Chappie, I've already found a few chunks on the passenger fender we took off, so I'm definitely going to agree with you on that one. I'm keeping the expectations really low, preparing for the worst, then maybe I'll get some nice surprises here and there when things aren't so bad.

I'm actually thinking of going out and picking up a little blasting kit for some small stuff after reading up about it last night. I don't really want to rely on shops for more than I have to, so if I can do it here I might as well try. I've seen a few setups online that are pretty inexpensive, and they'll work with the compressor I already have. I could probably set up a decent little area for it.

* gears turning *

 

[FDChappie]

I did rear 1/4 panels and floor boards in my Scout 12 years ago. In hindsight it would not have taken much more effort to just finish stripping the tub and had the whole thing sandblasted by a shop with the rear 1/4's off.

The harbor freight sandblaster works ok if you've got a big enough compressor and do some of the mods you'll find online. Do keep in mind that this is a small area solution, but it does clean things pretty fast and through.

 

[Cowtron]

Easter Weekend Progress

We got some work done on the Scout over the easter weekend. Pulled the engine, trans & t-case, pulled out the seats, and pulled up all the junky floor mat!

We were able to find a place sort of close by that had a cherry picker for rent. They let us keep it all weekend for a one-day charge since they would be closed on easter. Win!

It all came out pretty smooth, I had gone under the day before and disconnected all of the mounts, and the trans/t-case mating bolts. Well, almost all of them. Apparently I had forgotten one on the top :d it's much easier to take the transmission cover and shifters out to get to that last one.

Here is the engine & trans all propped up on the ground. If anybody wants them or anything from them, let me know, I have a post up in the classifieds board. I think the wife has dibs on the valve covers for some kind of project. One has a hole in it anyhow.

We didn't really have anything to put it on, so there she sits:

Then we hit the interior and started pulling out the seats and floor mat. We had the three of us all attacking different jobs at the sae time (hence the mess inside) so it went pretty well. This pic is a little out of order, but here it is with the seats out:

A nice little pile of rust that was hiding under the mat. This pile ended up being 4x that size on both the passenger and driver side:

Passenger side "lane viewport":

Driver side:

Driver side behind the seat:

I was able to just pull the seatbelt mechanism right out of the driver side with some wiggling.

Meanwhile, we had two sets of hands breaking loose the body mount bolts under the truck. The 4 rear-most ones were stuck in pretty well, it took the under-truck team a while to get those ones out. The ones under the driver and passenger floorboards were basically bolted to nothing, to the metal just peeled around them. Then we spent about 30 minutes trying to track down the last two, since we knew there were 8 but we only removed 6.

We finally realized that the two front mounts had been undone since we took the fenders off. I was literally using one of them as a coaster while I was furiously searching the internet :/

I was playing around with my new wire wheel a few days ago, and can't wait to attack the rest of the frame:

And since my buddy with the truck had work today, I hit the road in the mighty bug to return the cherry picker to the rental place. The guy at the counter had a good chuckle when he saw me pull up to the place :d

All in all, I think we made some great progress this weekend! Might be slow-going with the updates for a while, I'm gonna go in and have surgery on my neck Wednesday. But it should give me plenty of time to plan the next phase. Will need to figure out how we can lift the body up enough to get the frame free so it can meet it's wire-wheely doom! Has anybody here rigged something up without a gantry or big jacks? I'm thinking I might have to go with some manner of 4x4 and cinder block contraption for a stand.

Thanks for reading guys!

 

[fordboy]

If you can scrounge up 2 long 4x4's, 4 55 gallon drums and a high lift jack you could get the body off. Might be able to use a small bottle jack between the frame and body also. Get body high enough to fit 4x4's between frame and body long enough to reach past the tires. Then put 4x4's on top of 55 gallon barrels.

 

[XJames98]

Awesome build up. Coming along nicely.

 

[Cowtron]

...might be able to use a small bottle jack between the frame and body also...

Fordboy, I like that idea, since all I have is a tiny jack at the moment. I never thought about doing it like that.

Thanks xjames98! We're sort of flying be the seat of our pants, so I'm happy with it so far. This is our first truck project ever, so it's helping us a lot to see what the other guys here have done.

 

[XJames98]

thanks xjames98! We're sort of flying be the seat of our pants, so I'm happy with it so far. This is our first truck project ever, so it's helping us a lot to see what the other guys here have done.

Yeah I understand that.
Been kinda doing the same thing.
Last time I own a Scout it was 10 years ago.
So thing are a lot different from then.
But im feeling my why through it.

Well I live down in san diego. Not to far from you.
So if you ever need an extra hand let me know..

 

[punjig]

yeah I understand that.
Been kinda doing the same thing.
Last time I own a Scout it was 10 years ago.
So thing are a lot different from then.
But im feeling my why through it.

Well I live down in san diego. Not to far from you.
So if you ever need an extra hand let me know..

Ditto that! I'm a little further in vegas but if you to ever needed a hand or looking for extra parts, I have a lot scrounged up,:d let me know.

As far as removing the body, I would use the barrels and 4x4.

The build is looking cool!

 

[Cowtron]

Well, I've had a few posts up on bp, but wanted to update this thread too! I have a few posts to share to get up to date, so here goes....

Got some new body mount bushings in and decided that the body is really in no shape to be lifted up without crumpling. So we nixed the lifting plan for the time being and decided to take care of the floors and rockers in place. The post on replacing the bushings wasn't too exciting so I'll skip forward to the good stuff. Here's the progress from late June:

got a little bit of work done on the floors this weekend! After feeling a bit defeated with a cutoff wheel that wasn't cutting, I decided to go at it with a sawzall. It does, in fact, saw all. And then some.

I went with peeling the metal back until it stopped, then I knew I hit a weld and would drill it out. Initially I was trying to save the floor braces, but in my forum travels found the d&c evolution rock slider, and I really like the rocker/slider and floor braces they went with. I decided that I'm going to try and replicate that system on my truck. So in the end, trying to be careful with the floor braces was for little more than a learning experience, as I cut them out anyway.

Here's what I had by the end of day 1. But honestly, just trying to sneak in a shot of the IH hat I scored at tractor supply co. The other day :d

Once I got enough of the floor pulled back, I was able to pop the welds off of the center shelf area quite easily. From the looks of it, I May have to get under there and replace that crossmember. It's pretty solid, but really pitted and a little warped. I have a feeling that's going to be a whole episode, so I'm going to politely ignore it for the time being.

The next day we got to cutting out the rocker on the driver side, so we can replace it with square tubing. It's hard at first glance to see what's going on in the photo, but it's actually sitting on the ground under the truck.

Initially, the plan was to get a 3x3" square tube, cut it in half diagonally (essentially creating 2 sections of angle stock, we later realized), then patch it closed with a length of 4" flat stock to give it a sloped appearance. How hard could it be to cut through .188 steel with a circular saw?

Would not recommend. 0/10, would not bang.

We set up a guide for the saw using some square tubing we bought for floor supports. Unfortunately for us, instead of tacking the guide to the metal we were cutting, we opted to clamp it on both ends. It worked great, until we got to the middle where it wasn't clamped, and the saw was gradually pushing the middle of the guide outward so the cut started to stray off the line and got crooked. Pretty crooked. Crooked enough to say "meh" and start over.

The place we got the metal from will cut it for us, so that's what we're going to do. And, since we're starting over anyway, we're revising the plan a little bit. Instead of cutting it exactly diagonally, we are cutting the metal 2" in on two sides. I think keeping as many of the original bends as possible will be helpful in not only keeping the thing less sharp and pointy, but will probably be stronger as well. Here's the sketch we'll be giving the guys at the shop. Hopefully it will work out ok. We'll see what happens. If all else fails, we'll just stick a square tube in there and call it a day.

 

[Cowtron]

And now we're up to date with the progress from 4th of July weekend and this past Friday.

Went back to the metal place and got some more 3x3 tubing, but this time went with a .120 wall, which made it a little easier to cut. The place actually wouldn't make the cut I needed, which I thought was strange, but we tacked on our guides this time and came out with a nice cut on both sides!

I don't have a pic of the section cut, but where we made our cuts ended up making it so the flat stock wouldn't fit inside for a smooth seam, so we ended up welding it to the outside across the gap. I was a little bummed that it wouldn't be flush with itself, but once we got it on the truck it came out better than we could have planned for. The plate being on the outside brings it perfectly flush with the door. Pics of that toward the end.

Here are a few shots before we installed it:

We went out and got a nice chop saw, since we've all taken nicely to the welding, and I don't see us giving it up any time soon. With it, we took the front end of the rocker and cut it at a 45 degree angle to make it more "slidey" then welded some caps on both ends:

When it came time to weld it in, I gave it the ol college try on that back dogleg, but the thing is pretty rotted away so I think I'm going to order a new one. But here is the rocker/slider mostly in place for now:

The front was in a bit better shape, but there was a bit of a gap I had to try and fix. We jacked the front up and it helped close the gap, but it was still a little tough to weld on the right half here:

Seeing as the cab is still hanging down in the front without a body mount in place, the door alignment is a bit off. When we jacked it up to the place it will sit one the mounts are in, we were able to temporarily get the door gaps nearly perfect! I was really amazed at the dumb luck we had between that and the flat stock protruding just the right amount. Here's to hoping we can reproduce these results on the passenger side.

Here's a shot of the back end, which stops just about even with the center shelf mount, though it's hard to tell from this angle.

Once I get the new back dogleg in there I can weld the back portion in better and I'll get some pics. But for now, it's in there better than the old one, ten times as strong.

Next we are going to tackle the body mount in the front, but have just discovered that we have nothing solid to weld the 1x3 tube to on the transmission tunnel side. The box area that is raised up behind the gas pedal is totally rotted out around the bottom edge, where we would have been welding the tube. I have the gears turning, but if anybody knows off the top of their head a good thread that goes over a problem like that I'd be appreciative for a link or some advice on the subject.

I'll try and be a little more diligent posting updates to both threads, but we'll see. Have a good one guys!

 

[RMScout]

Great job on the rockers. 0.120 is never going to rust out in cali, just don't let your truck drop 1 foot onto rocks. As far as the mounts I can't picture exactly what you're talking about. When I'm stuck like this I usually just start cutting out cardboard and taping it up until I get something that looks good.

 

[Cowtron]

Hey, thanks for the compliment on the rockers! The truck probably won't see an awful lot of rock dropping, but hopefully the rocker can hold up to the occasional scrape better than the old ones. You bring up a good point with the templates, I'll probably throw something like that together too.

It is kind of hard to get the idea without pictures, I'll try and get under there to take some once this crazy rain lets up here in socal. I think I saw a dude float by in a gondola earlier :d

 

[Cowtron]

So I have been kind of tossing it around in my head, and I realized May have created a bit of an issue when cutting the old floors out.

The threads I've been able to find all go over replacing just the outermost floor panel, from the seam of the transmission tunnel out toward the doors. Well, we actually cut out the floor on both sides of that seam, and now I'm running into a hiccup when looking for a spot for the 3 floor braces to be welded in. You can kind of see in the 3rd from last pic in the last post, what I have basically done is create a noodly strip of metal where the two panels used to meet. It's really floppy, and I can't see it being a good idea to weld braces to it.

I guess the question is, when you have to replace the floor as well as part of the trans tunnel, how do you go about replacing floor braces? Should I just get some more tubing and run it up each side of the trans tunnel?

If that makes any sense to anybody I'm all ears. I'll try to get out there and get some better pics to describe the problem.