'69 International Scout Part VI - E85 Tune - Plus Street and Trail Payoff!

From a 41 year old bone stock utility truck to a modern daily driver, weekend wheeler

today on Xtreme 4x4. Our 69 scout goes for its final merit badge on the road and on the trail, let me show you how you fall off a rock and not get the big bump.

Oh, you got me bumper.

I hit the bumper

every now and then here at extreme, we build a project that really strikes a chord with you guys at home. Sometimes it's the over the top custom fab that does it other times it's the budget or lack thereof. But in the case of this truck, I think it's possibly it's history. Maybe it's old school styling or the fact that this sucker is just damn cool, but no matter how many ways you slice it, this scout 808 is possibly our most popular project to date.

And I'll let you know a little secret.

It's my favorite too.

It all started when I got a phone call from a viewer who said that he found this rust free. 1969 Scout 800 A for less than two Js.

Obviously, I told him to buy it on the spot.

Scout guys have been bugging us for years to tackle a corn binder. And what better than the classic 800?

We drove it around to get some shots before putting it under the knife just because we could.

The little four cylinder engine still ran like a clock.

And in the woods, this classic tackled the trails with ease.

The first order of business was the drive train. And for that, we cut up a 72 scout too to borrow his rear axle and 345 power plant

with a data 44 front axle. Out of a mid 80 Chevy,

we installed an A B air locker and a set of 488 gears with chrome molly shafts front and rear.

We knew it was important for this truck to still be an international at heart.

So we rebuilt the 345 with fresh rings and bearing

and with a little curveball tossed on an affordable fuel injection kit that was capable of running the truck on

the 85 ethanol.

See, scouts are often called corn binders because of their agricultural background

and 85 base material is corn,

corn binder, burning corn.

How cool is that

keeping with the idea that rebuilding is better than replacing a

704 automatic transmission was rebuilt with a monster in the box kit from monster transmission

backed up with an Atlas to transfer case.

You guys are always asking for more detailed information on how to build a roll cage.

So we pulled the body off the truck and took you step by step through the designing and building of the roll cage on our scouting hunt.

Now, today we have our scout back in the shop to finish up, take on its first trip out on the street and more importantly into the dirt. But before that truck can go anywhere, we need to install a couple of drive lines. Now, we measured for both of our shafts and check the angle on our rear shaft, sent that information off to Je reel at real drive line service. So he could build us a rear and front drive shaft.

I'm sure a lot of you guys are thinking drive shafts, they probably haven't changed a lot over the years while there is some new technology in these two shafts. The first is the rear. This is a new

Napco 1350 CV joint. Now it can handle 32 degrees of angle without binding, which means the rear shaft will have a lot less vibration and last a lot longer in our truck. Now, the front shaft is equipped with the new

four wheel drive U joints. Now, at the very end of the shaft, you can see with the cup off, there's a small lip machine right into the Trion of the joint. Now that will work hand in hand with this new seal and cup design that will lock the cup onto the U joint and keep it from falling off if you have to remove the drive shaft to do any trail repairs. More importantly, it'll keep water and dirt

out of the joint.

The rear shaft is a flat CV style shaft to allow for more angle on the rear. Mainly because of the rear four length. When it droops out.

We also added an Atlas support ring from Roar

fab

to eliminate any concerns about stress on our transmission tail housing.

We good.

Yeah. Drop it down. All right.

Now, as most of you guys remember the truck was originally a four cylinder that we replaced with a 345 V8. Now, when we installed that V8, we put it in a different location than a V8 would come in the scout from the factory. So we needed a custom radiator. Now, performance rod and custom builds 100% custom all aluminum heat exchangers and they can build

in any size or shape that you need in either a top flow or a cross flow like we have here. You could specify your inlets and outlets locations as well as sizes and the location of your fill cap. Now even install a fan on either side of the radiator as either a pusher or a puller and we have ours installed on the outside as a puller to draw the hot air from underneath the hood.

Two techs who are not full of hot air dropped by to tune up our E 85 fuel injection set.

That's next and later on, Ian and Chris take the scout out on patrol. We started this truck with about 2500 bucks in it. Now, we got about 15 grand in it.

That's funny. Well spent considering this truck is either new or rebuilt, bumper to bumper.

Welcome back to the home stretch of our scout 800 build a truck. We told you we keep mostly international

and we did.

The last step is crucial for anyone retrofitting a classic motor to run on modern fuel injection

and here to help

plus tune our norman norm from affordable fuel injection.

What do you think of the scout now that you've seen? Well, I think it's neat. It's cool.

We have a lot of scouts. We sell a lot of kits for scouts. It's a niche market but a lot of guys enjoy them and we've done a lot of them and

we like it. This is, this is cool. I like this.

Norman and his son are here to help tune our system. They sent us this kit and it came with everything we needed to make this truck run distributor, throttle body, fuel pump filter, all the wiring harness and the sensors as well as the computer.

See if we can change that coolant sensor over. Yeah, we can do that right now. I'll do that right now.

Ok.

Well as you know, E 85 has a lower energy level in the fuel than gasoline does.

So you can't just take calibrations for gasoline and run E 85 with it.

So we've installed an E 85 module on this

that will automatically adjust the

calibration or the tune in the ECM to match the E 85

with this to make it work. We run it on gasoline first so that the module learns how that's operating.

Then you will run this uh, vehicle for

about 10 miles with a mixture of 85 and gasoline,

run that 1015 miles. Once that is done, you will put pure E 85 in it.

Then the E 85 will learn into that module

and then it will be good for the duration no matter what mixture of E 85 you put in it, whether it's gasoline or full E 85

while tuning on the truck, everything looked good. We do have one problem and that is the exhaust is reading really lean. When the truck is at idle, we'll hunt that down by checking out the alternator.

The alter on this truck from the factory was never designed to charge at idle. It always charged at 2500 RPM, which was never really a problem on a carbureted vehicle. But because we got fuel injection, we need to have that voltage right at the idle. So we need to get it up about 1314 volts. But because this alternator won't deliver that kind of power until

you rev the engine up. The computer is getting confused. It's looking for voltage and it's not seeing. And so it's kind of messing up some of the sensor.

The solution is pretty simple. We'll ditch that alternator and swap it out for one that can deliver up to 14 volts just right off idle. So it'll be a newer GM series alternator that can deliver that kind of power and then the fuel injection will work perfectly good

to solve our low voltage at idle problem. We're gonna replace our stock alternator with this new power star alternator that we got from painless performance. Now, although it may look like a factory GM alternator just set up for one wire operation. It's not what's inside this alternator is what counts. The rectifier bridge is designed to turn on a lot lower RPM and it will deliver 100 amps of charging voltage just off idle.

Once the new alternator is hooked up, all that's left is to install our custom canvas top

and hit the road, which is what we'll do after the break.

One.

Let's go scouting,

scouting for what?

That's a good question. A razor for you. Oh,

George Michael Beard.

When we first started our scout 800 a project, we asked a simple question

is a 40 year old, mid size SUV, still practical in today's world.

A

truck that was actually built to go off road, not just to the mall, a sport utility vehicle, but believe it or not, doesn't have a single cup holder.

Well, today we hope to have an answer for you. You know, driving this truck is really no different than driving a modern day SUV. Yeah, there's a

little bit of wind noise and a couple of squeaks and rattles and all that stuff is minor when it comes to cruising around in a classic truck like this

all day long.

The 345 takes along great

with plenty of torque in the low end to make pavement pounding, no problem at all.

And with the 700 i-go overdrive transmission backing it up, you can relax on the highway and cruise at a comfortable speed.

Now you guys are always asking what kind of money do we got wrapped up in these projects? We started this truck with about 2500 bucks in it. Now, we got about 15 grand in it. That's money well spent considering this truck is either new or rebuilt bumper to bumper

in a way. This flex fuel truck is a tribute to rebuilding what you have.

The truck itself is four decades old.

The engine and rear axle are 35 years old.

The front axle and transmission are in their twenties.

Yeah, we freshen them up with some new parts,

but in the end, we rescued a pile of stuff from the wrecking yard

and built one hell of a cool truck,

having a 40 year old truck that's running on E 85. Ethanol is pretty damn cool.

Now, you can find E 85 at almost any gas station. It's going to cost you about 30 to 40 cents cheaper per gallon. Now, it's a true mixture of both ethanol and gasoline and the cool thing is, is the ethanol portion is grown, harvested, processed and refined right here in the United States.

85 may seem like groundbreaking technology.

The truth is back in the 19 hundreds, Henry Ford partnered with an oil company to produce a methanol based crop fuel that was made from hemp.

He also hooked up with Rudolph diesel

and they came up with an alternative diesel based fuel that was actually peanut oil based.

All that aside, we didn't build this truck to cruise to the mall like a modern day SUV. We built it to do this

before we pat ourselves on the back too much. Let's see how our corn binder does on the rocks that plus a healthy mud bath. When Xtreme 4x4 continues there always used to be a puddle here but it was never this deep.

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We're back on extreme. And we finally got our little scout 800 A where it belongs deep in the woods doing some four wheeling

and to join us, we got a bunch of other scout owners with us all from the IH Scout Association of Middle Tennessee. This is really nice.

Yeah. Uh, he's, he's

custom, uh, made that

love affair with the scouts dates back

to my childhood. And I think probably a lot of these people's childhood. My grandfather drove one, my father drove one

and look at the popularity of them. Still a lot of those Jeep guys like Jeeps, but the scouts, you know, they're just a little more tough and rugged. So I guess that's maybe why they're a little more fun. You don't have to have to worry about tearing up so much stuff for them. I guess

I built this for Paul

Doer,

correct to his specifications.

This is the epitome of the dual purpose truck. This goes 97 miles an hour down the freeway and crawls up anything,

Ian, what do you say? We go topless today?

You can.

Oh, he needs the roof. Oh, I thought he was taking his shirt off.

Now, our scout is rolling on 37 inch tall tires and that may not be the most extreme size when you think about wheeling.

But when you're rolling on a Dana 44 it still gives you plenty of ground clearance in the trails.

See, let me show you how you fall off a rock and not get the big bump here.

Oh, you got me bumper.

I hit the bumper.

The Atlas 24.3 low range gearing made crawling easy.

Add to that the low end grunt torque of our 345.

And you can idle over most smaller obstacles.

Uh. 000,

ok. We're into the door, we're into the door. It's ok though.

All these scout guys right now,

they're crying.

Yeah, they'd be crying.

I'll try one more time. Then we're getting the winch out. All right.

Uh,

if I remember right, there's a big mud hole raid.

There always used to be a puddle here but it was never this deep.

You got ad ring shackle in your truck.

Let's just pull your truck up here. I think you can make it through there. Can't you?

Not quite far enough.

You almost made it to the dry spot. I was that close.

I would have crawled to the back of the truck.

Jumped out there.

Like how

I would have done this.

Wow.

Yeah.

What is it?

Yeah,

I slept in the mud.

Our custom winch bumper blocks. A lot of air flow into our radiator.

But the 16 inch small fan and the PR C radiator help keep our engine temps in check all day long.

Yeah, here's the scout.

The Mickey Thompson Baha

claws. Conform to the rocks easily and by installing the ST

internal bead locks, we could air down and never worry about unseating either. Beads

for those of you out there who think scouts can't hang on the trail.

Check out all these guys who brought out rigs basically from stock to insanely modified. See, this is what I call an off road ready truck right here. The ultimate paint job bed liner

everywhere

they could tackle any trail you pointed them at

and had a ton of fun doing it

a little bit driver.

There you go. Now you'll clear the street.

Sweet.

It's always harder getting the pretty trucks through the trail.

So, if you're looking for a classic truck with a ton of heritage that you could drive every day and still tackle some serious trails, maybe there's a scout in your future.