'69 International Scout Part III - W.E.Rock Geo Tracker

From a 40 year old SUV

to a modern classic today on Xtreme 4x4, our scout 800 a returns for a beefier drive train powered by a potent fuel that would make Jed Clampett Proud.

Plus going all stock in an unlikely comp rig.

Ok.

There is no question that certain makes and models of trucks are extremely popular with core groups of guys. Scout is definitely one of them.

You guys have sent us countless emails and a bunch of messages on message boards telling us how much you love

of this project. Plus you've been downloading each episode off the internet like it's going out of style proving that our Scout 800 A is possibly one of our most popular projects today. So we brought it back in the shop today to deal with all the drive train.

Last time we had the scout in the shop, we went ahead and completely tore down this 345 V8 that we pulled out of a scout too. And now we're gonna go ahead and build mounts for both the motor, the transmission and the transfer case in our project truck. Now, we're gonna do that with a bare block, completely empty, makes it a lot lighter, easier to wrestle around underneath the hood of the truck and to make it even easier than that, we're gonna go ahead and pull the body right off the frame.

You don't have to pull the body off of your project to swap in a V8 engine. But in our case, it's gonna make things a lot easier,

will have easy access to build motor mounts as well as transmission and transfer case mounts.

Plus while we're at it, we'll clean up the frame, give it a coat of paint.

When we tore our engine down. Last time, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that it had been recently rebuilt. Now, we could tell that because our connecting rods already had number punch marks on them. But more importantly, our cylinders are in very good shape.

There is almost no ridge built up at the top near the combustion chamber and we can still see the cross hatch pattern of a previous h

job. Now, what that means, it's going to save us a little bit of money. We originally planned to carry this motor out to a machine shop, possibly have it bored out,

honed and prepped for a rebuild. But because we still see that cross hatch pattern, we know our cylinders are in good shape. So we'll go ahead and just ring it bearing, freshen it up now because the cylinders are looking good. We're going to protect them from any we spotter with a little bit of tape.

We're gonna ditch our factory motor mounts and replace them with a set of heavy duty rebuildable ones from IH only

then we'll mount the adapter plate to the back of our 345

and bolt up our 700 R 44 speed automatic transmission.

Then all we have to do is build a cross member.

We're making a real conscious effort with our scout to hide all of our modern technology underneath the classic skin of our 808. That's why we installed the A RB air lockers inside the original scout two axles. And the same reason why we put this 700 R four behind the 345 V8. When you pop the hood, it's gonna look all international. But then underneath, we'll have the four speed automatic that'll work great on the highway. And then behind that, we have the Atlas two transfer case that'll really work great in the dirt. Now, the Atlas two is a full gear transfer case and we opted for a 4.3 to 1 low range ratio that'll work really well with our gear set as well as our 37 inch tall tires. We have heavy duty 32 spline outputs both front and rear and on the back, we chose to have a flat CV flange installed that way we can run a CV style

drive shaft to eliminate vibrations at high speed. Now, the real bread and butter of the Atlas is the twin stick design. We're going to be able to operate both front and rear outputs independently, so we'll be able to do front digs when we're out on the trail to basically fit through narrow areas. Now, we're a little concerned of the height of this entire drive train, but before we go changing anything that we've got set up right now, we're going to roll it back underneath the body, lower it down and check for clearance issues.

Uh Transfer case is starting to hit.

It's also hitting the,

the head's gonna hit

the body up here.

Now

we get to cut it all up

and we can drop this engine a whole bunch before the tranny pan will get below the frame rail doing this will give a better weight distribution and it won't affect any of the trucks, ground clearance

with the floor cut to clear the transfer case. We can roll the frame back out weld in everything for good. Give our frame a Kota bed liner

die

jack

up next short wheelbase plus lightweight make, Jake Good's tracker. A we rock contender.

Oh,

we see guys out there building all kinds of rigs, everything from tricked out DJ S to souped up. Sammy's now a cousin of the Suzuki. Well, it's a vehicle you either love it or you hate it. That's right. We're talking about the little GEO tracker but can an 85 horsepower four banger. Hang with the We Rock Pros. Well, we're gonna find out

once the literary home of Mark Twain today, Hannibal Missouri is the place to find one of this country's top off road parks. They have a real nice park here and it's a fun place this year. The venue hosted the first annual We Rock All Stock Nationals. When we say the All Stock Nationals, it's actually the stock modified Classic competition, which is more of your,

your trail rig. A lot of these rigs could actually be street legal. In fact, some of them have license plates on them still, which means the drivers in this class can't fall back on $10,000 parts to get them through. It's truly a driver's class. Everything is off the shelf, including the tires. We could do a lot of things that pro mods we

want to do without rooster or without 37 inch sticky tires and we prove it every day. And

it's great

for the fans. They connect with these trail rigs and daily drivers makes it to where you are. The guy at home can realize what his Jeep can do. Everybody could relate to him. A lot of Jeepers see a vehicle that's like their say, wow, that guy's only on 35. So looks what he's doing facing down the rocks, powdery dirt and tough cone placement.

The stock mod class had never confronted a tougher course

it is some hard stuff. Uh, they basically got us running pro mod stuff and this is nothing like recreational wheeling in a sea of Jeeps. Jake Good. And his 1996 geo tracker stand out. Uh, we really wanted to pick something that was different.

Uh, we didn't wanna have, didn't wanna come out and compete with every other Jeep guy and what he's brought out here isn't some novelty go

geo

geo and off roading rock rolling. Those two don't belong in the same sentence even. But I'll tell you what they do

a regional regular out of Kansas City. Jake. Good. Got the call to come out and compete against the We Rock Pros. It's excited to be a part of this and be able to compete with the Pros uh that, that run these circuits. It's awesome to be here with a second place finish in the regional our rock series. Jake proved the GEO

was legit. Driving the geo tracker is a lot like driving a go cart. The size is real compact, not a lot of room to move around in there, but it really can get you around some big rocks and give you a little bit more room than some of these other guys have to deal with. Backed by an 85 horsepower stock four cylinder. This course wouldn't come easy.

Got a little bit of underdog to us. We're driving something a little different.

Uh So most people kind of tend to write that off going up against the pro heavies. Jake and his spotter, Scott Angel may be underdogs

but not everyone was writing them off.

Those guys know strategy. They are amazing

going for all the obstacles and bonus lines. This team wasn't messing around at this level of competition. You gotta go for it.

You never know. It might bounce just right and something might work in your favor. And if you're not there to take advantage of it, it won't happen. Running in third place. Jake didn't hit a snag until day one's final course.

They finished the day and fifth. Uh We're real happy with where we're at.

Um We're not very far behind the leaders and uh we're sitting real well right now needing a top six to move into the shootout on day two, Jake continued to use the geos short wheelbase to his advantage.

Oh, everything's pumping. Everything's going on all four cylinders, including me proving to be the little GEO that could.

The crowd was loving it.

That's awesome. It's great to have the support from the crowd and we're real proud to be here at the uh Cooper All Stock Nationals. They finished in fifth and qualified for the shootout. We're ready to go. We've got our plan laid out. We just gotta stick to it. Stay calm and uh finish the course during the one obstacle shootout. Jake and his GEO didn't disappoint

once an afterthought the wild card entry, finished the title event

in four

win lose or draw. We are here. We're having fun. You can't beat it. This is the greatest opportunity we really appreciate. We Rock and Cooper tires for letting us in on this deal.

Got it.

We're back on extreme and we're right in the middle of our scout 800 a project. Now, previously, when we test fit the drive train, we had a slight clearance issue on the driver's side and cylinder head against this piece of firewall. We simply cut it out and then patched it up with some flat plate and gave it a coat of black paint. And the reason we had to do this was we've actually move the drive train a little bit further back in the chassis than this model of truck came with from the factory. Now, speaking of our chassis, we finished lining the entire frame with the bed liner. We went ahead and completely reassembled everything. So once again, we have a true rolling chassis ready for a drive train. But before we put that in,

we got to rebuild the engine.

Rebuilding our 345 V8 is definitely the right decision for a lot of different reasons. Number one, it's gonna keep our scout and international at heart. And number two, it's what you guys at home would do. You take an old junkyard, find like this, freshen it up and get it underneath the hood. Now we got everything we need for this rebuild from Northern auto parts. And they specialize in complete engine kits with rod bearings, main bearings and a brand new oil pump, new camshaft lifters and a timing set. All the gaskets you need and even eight new pistons and rinks. All we had to do was carry our pistons out to a local machine shop and have the old ones removed and the new ones installed that was less than 50 bucks. The engine kit itself was under 700. So it's very economical choice for our little scalp.

Before we start assembly, we will give our engine block a nice coat of

red paint

with new main bearings in the block and some royal purple assembly lube on the mating surfaces. The crank is dropped into place.

Yeah,

followed by the new pistons.

Then we can check all our bearing clearances with some plastic gau

and with everything would inspect,

the bottom end can be torn.

Our new camshaft is a stock profile

with new matched lifters

with the engine at top dead center.

The timing gears are lined up to set the valve timing,

a

timing cover and the oil pan will button up the bottom end

and our short block is complete

now, just like our engine block. The cylinder heads for this motor were in very good shape. All we had to do to prep the short block was run a home down the cylinders and all we had to do for our heads was clean them up. When we got them in the bar

salt tank and cleaned up the combustion chamber, we could see that there's a set of new valves installed and the seals are in very good shape. So we simply cleaned off all the mud and shot them with some of the international harvester red paint. Now, one area you want to pay attention to if you

building a 345 are these oil drain back holes in the cylinder head because they sit so low down in this valley, they have a tendency to plug up if you don't change your oil often and you get a lot of sludge build up. And what that'll do is the oil pump will pump the oil up to the top end of the motor and it won't be able to drain back down and therefore starve your engine. So you wanna make sure you maintain your 340 fives and if you do have some oil issues, go ahead and check those drain back holes.

Now, the intake manifold would have sprayed with some aluminum paint to dress it up a bit. But the exhaust manifolds, we sent them out and had them nitro plated. Now, this will keep the heat inside the exhaust manifold and keep it from radiating out into the firewall and the passenger compartment. And once we have these bolted up, we can start to take care of

some of the fuel delivery.

So far today, we've test fit the drive train into our scout, made some modifications to the motor mounts to make it all fit. And then we went ahead and completely rebuilt our 345 V8 engine. Now it's time to deal with some fuel delivery and it's not getting a carburetor. It's getting fuel injection all the way. Now. Affordable fuel injection makes complete fuel injection kits for almost any engine out there.

They have a kit specifically for the 345 International V8. Now, their kits come in two different varieties. One is a do it yourself kit where you source some of the parts yourself. We got the complete kit that includes the wiring harness, the computer, the fuel pump, the adapter plate, a new throttle body unit as well as a distributor. But the coolest thing about our kit is the fact that they were able to hook us up with a flat

fuel conversion for our EF I. Now, what that means is we're gonna be able to run this engine on both gasoline as well as E 85 ethanol. Now, E 85 ethanol can be somewhat hard to understand, but if y'all know what's in this little jar here, you'll be able to understand it completely. This is a corn based alcohol in here sometimes

referred to as moonshine. Now how they make ethanol is similar to how the guys make moonshine. They take an organic plant material and they basically process into a alcohol form

companies then take that alcohol, send it to a refinery and then mix it with gasoline. And E 85 is born. Now, the best thing about E 85 it's a little bit more environmentally friendly. It's a little bit cheaper. But for us, the coolest thing is it's gonna be a corn binder. Engine burning corn is the fuel.

Yeah.

One area that we definitely want to upgrade because we're going to flex fuel is the ignition system and we're going to start with a set of E three spark plugs.

Now, the diamond fire design of the electrode really concentrates the spark into the center of the combustion chamber and that helps with that initial kickoff of the fuel and that'll really help with E 85 because it needs to burn at a little bit higher rate. And we also

upsize these plugs to two heat ranges to help with that initial kickoff. Now, we'll also be installing a protonic

second strike ignition box. Now, this delivers multiple sparks through the entire RPM range and it also has a built in rev limiter. Now, the rev limiter is good because if you remember when we took this engine apart, we found some bent push rods. We've determined that that was from over revving the engine apparently a very common problem. So we'll cap this thing off at about 3700 RPM and it should be fine

And there you go guys. If you got an old motor in your shop and you want it in your project, go ahead. Tear it down. We have just over two grand in this thing and we got a completely brand new fuel injected engine running flex fuel technology. Just gotta get your hands a little dirty, do a little work. But when it's all done, you can reward yourself a little drink.

Grows on you though.

I can't drink another sip, man. Oh my God.

Sure.

Nap time.