Hodgdon acquires Accurate and Ramshot

Cherokee

Medina, Ohio
I was happy with my Scout V8, once we got the transmission shifting correctly, but it rusted out much too quickly.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
they were just the old dodge 727 transmission with a different bolt pattern on the housing.
the 304's used a spacer on the flywheel to match up to the torque converter instead of changing the engine block.
 

358156 hp

At large, whereabouts unknown.
LOL, the only binder I had was a Travelall! Mine was a baby blue half-ton set up from the factory to tow trailers. If you're not familiar with the IH "Light Line", they were hell for stout in all areas except for rust-proofing. A half-ton IH frame was heavier than 3/4 or 1 ton frames today. The cabs were huge and comfortable, and they rode really well. Mine was a 2 wheel drive, but you'd never know it to drive it in mud or snow. All you needed was decent tires and an adventurous spirit. I really wanted a 4WD Travelall, but couldn't find one back then.
 

RicinYakima

High Steppes of Eastern Washington
I had a 1966 Scout, 345 cid (?) and four speed. Go anywhere in low/low with the hand throttle pulled out a touch. Once idled it up a snowy logging road looking for elk and it stopped. No traction. Got out and the snow was up to my waist, as it had pulled itself up onto a 14" high stump onto the skid plate. Two hours of shovelings and high lift jacking to get it back off.

Also had a bad habit of slipping out of 4 high into neutral on the transfer case making a left turn, like a city street on ice or slick snow. It would rotate around the 1200 pound engine block like a top.
 
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RBHarter

West Central AR
Dad always if you can get an IH to move they will roll all day .....it's getting them to move the first time .
 

John

Active Member
I worked for an ID dealership in 76, then jumped to an independent tractor shop. I wanted a Terra with a diesel but just couldn't swing it being a single male gunlover.
I had a friend who worked on their medium truck line and said he loved it when the line broke down. It was the only time he could get enough weld on his assigned assembly.
 

John

Active Member
Dad always if you can get an IH to move they will roll all day .....it's getting them to move the first time .
A local cowboy who won more than a few NRA titles, Butch Reynolds dug graves for the local mortician, a close friend. He said Butch had a starter go out on his old IH backhoe so he parked it on the manure pile for 3 years before he replaced the starter. He would get it keyed and put in the clutch and have one shot to jump start it. For Butch, that was pretty good odds.
 

Petrol & Powder

Well-Known Member
My trials with IH products included a 1966 two wheel drive pickup with about 300K miles. It was always a bit uncertain how many times the odometer had cycled past zero but twice seemed likely.
Like all IH products, the body was more rust than metal. It had a Borg Warner 3-Speed and a Rockwell 4.10 rear axle (pretty typical of that era IH) but the engine was a large IH in-line six. Unlike the body and frame that needed constant attention, the engine was bullet proof. It always started, pulled like a tractor and was an absolute workhorse. If that engine had a better truck wrapped around it, the experience would have been a lot more positive.
 

Walks

Well-Known Member
I've never understood why IH stopped making "passenger" vehicles just as the SUV craze started.
 

358156 hp

At large, whereabouts unknown.
One of our customer bought a mid-sized well drilling rig at an auction. He got the truck engine to start okay, but was concerned that the drill rig engine might not start. I looked at it a saw my old friend, the C263 Binder engine. I told him it would start, and it did!

Those were the days!
 

358156 hp

At large, whereabouts unknown.
I've never understood why IH stopped making "passenger" vehicles just as the SUV craze started.
The bigger trucks, the pickups and Travelalls were cut after 1975, mostly due to IH having too many irons in the fire. Truck dealers wanted to sell the big trucks, and the Light Line was already outdated and didn't compete well against Ford, GM, & Dodge. I felt that a lot of that was an image issue, the light trucks were being sold by Farm Dealers and big Truck Dealers in antiquated dealerships vs. the smooth marketing exhibited by the Big 3 dealerships. These dealerships weren't as cool an the Big 3 lots, and IH trucks projected a "hickish" image to the public. And they has a reputation for rusting. The Scout did survive until the early 1980s though.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
13.4 all day long in the 4 wd scout [you know at 63 mph] I had all kinds of work done on it and it'd do a bit over 130 mph.
but I had to have someone pace me out to tell me it was going that fast, the speedo stopped at 120.

the Travelall's I had were both 4wd.
the 68 was a off purple/brown color and got nicknamed petunia.
the green one was a 74 and sorta shared some parts with the pickups, and some with the scout.
kind of weird how they done some of their stuff, radiator hoses, oil pumps oil pans and several other parts were either truck or scout only parts.
you could however swap over the parts if you swapped over the entire series like pump and pan, or entire cooling systems.
unless one was an improved system then you had to swap heads, thermostat housing, water pump, by-pass hoses etc.
or you could JB weld the extra water jacket off and take out a freeze out plug in the front of the head...LOL.
 

Rally

NC Minnesota
My first truck was a 1965 Scout, with slant 4 that was turbo charged. Turbo charger was propelled by a metal oil line, that kept braking/vibrating. I replaced it with a larger diameter copper line and it increased the output of the turbo charger and engine (all by mistake). It came with street tires on it, about bald, so a buddies Dad sold me 4 used Firestone 9.15-15 bias ply tires that howled terrible going down the road, and were so out of round they shook going down the road at anything over 45 mph. It had a 8 trac tape player in it but the only tape I ever had was Neil Diamonds "Harvest" . Didn't matter, because the tires howled so bad you couldn't hear it anyway! Suspension was horrible, it had leaf springs in it, but I could have four people and a deer in it and it still rode level. Vacuum windshield wipers that changed speed with the engine's rpm's. Hand crank windows that took twenty minutes to roll them up, and the vibration from tires slowly rolled them down! Hard top that took at least three guys to lift off, but the chicks loved it without the top, but they weren't too crazy about the fox, coon, and deer blood in the bed!! Chasing a fox across a frozen corn field was a one of akind experience, but there was rarely any mud stuck to the undercarriage. Hydraulic clutch was a poor system, had to replace the slave cylinder twice, but that might have had something to do with the frozen cornfields, but we got a bunch of fox!
 

Petrol & Powder

Well-Known Member
I've never understood why IH stopped making "passenger" vehicles just as the SUV craze started.
Others have addressed this but in addition what has already been said;
The IH light truck line was dying long before it actually died. It wasn't until the mid/late 1980's that SUV platform became popular in suburban and urban America. Prior to that, SUV's were relegated to rural use and work vehicles. The IH light truck line was on life support by that time. So while a market segment opened up, IH was in no position to exploit it.
As for IH dealers, it wasn't a function of what they "wanted" to sell, it was a function of what they could sell. The light truck line just was not competitive.
 

Rick H

Well-Known Member
I have a fondness for IH Scouts. Never had one but owe a fella with one. I parked my '77 F150 4x2 over an underground stream. As my buddy and I got out to get ready to hunt the whole front end burst through the sod...leaving the front wheel dangling in the water and the frame resting on the bank. My buddy was a few weeks out from a hernia surgery so he wasn't going to push and we were literally up a creek without a paddle, (or a come-along).

While cursing and scratching our heads about what to do next.....and trying to not think about the 15 mile or so walk back to anything that looked like civilization....this guy pulls up with a IH Scout. One of the newer style ones (in '78) with the weird stripes. He threw a chain around my hitch and pulled me out of that hole like a child pulls a sled. He wouldn't take a thing but thanks for it either. Made me a fan.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
what's funny is everywhere I drove mine someone would of course see it and they'd all have a story like that.

someone pulled them out of a ditch or whatever, they watched someone drive one off a cliff, they got passed by one when stuck in a snow drift, they watched one pull a school bus back on the road, they seen a guy pull a tree off the road big enough to make a 4 person canoe.
it seemed like everyone knew someone with one or had a story about them.
 

Petrol & Powder

Well-Known Member
What I find funny is that most of the IH Scouts I saw had holes the size of basketballs in the floors, the doors were held on by one loose hinge and the latch sort of worked. The body was usually a combination of fiberglass, Bondo and aluminum patches. Every screw, nut, bolt and clip on the thing was either rusted off or rusted beyond hope. And the interior looked like a chicken coop.

The only part of the drivetrain made by IH was the engine.
 

Bisley

Active Member
But back to powder availability,

I don't think we have much to worry about. The current situation re: fixed ammunition and primers is a result of shortage, but not panic. In last elections there was a shortage of dies, bullet molds, powders, everything. I am not seeing that so much now. There are bunches of new gun owners who will want to stay in practice, requiring ammunition, and loading components. Truth is, as has been mentioned on other threads throughout this forum, we are a minority and a thin market for manufacturers. But we appear poised to grow. Handloaders purchasing canister lots of smokeless propellant are a small portion of the market (I'm going back to Phil Sharpe's 1948 description of the proportions distributed to the manufacturers versus handloaders), but will remain solid, I believe. There's still profits to be made selling to handloaders. I think we'll be okay.