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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Alameda has a fair number of International Harvester vehicles (we had a Favorite DOTS IHC poll with the last one , and the 1948 KB-2 pickup won), most of which seem to get regular driving time. Today we're going to check out a no-frills truck that's eager for the collapse of civilization, at which point it will become more valuable than all the Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis in the state put together. Most of the time, when I see a jacked-up 4x4 with big mud-slingin' tires in a context as distinctly urban as this, it strikes me as a silly vehicle. Not so with an International Harvester! This Scout might not be a '72, but the grille is a '72. No doubt some parts have been swapped here or there, so there's no telling at a glance. If it is a '72, the available engines were a (non-AMC) 304 V8 and a 196-cube four-cylinder. Base...
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Welcome to Down On The Street, where we look at old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Another Truck Monday has rolled around, which means we can contemplate work vehicles as we descend into the salt mine for the day's tasks, and this week's DOTS truck is another example of farm equipment maker International Harvester's road machinery. It's been a couple months since our last Scout in this series, and this is the oldest one I've managed to find on the island so far. In '72, you could get your Scout II with a 196-cube four-cylinder engine (that's 3.2 liters, for you fans of the metric system and/or really big four-bangers) or a 304-cubic-inch V8. No, that's not an AMC engine- genuine farm equipment here! Breakers breakers, any takers? It's been a while since CB radios were relevant; whatever vestige of CB that the cellphone didn't kill, cheap and powerful FMS/GMRS radios finished off. Still, a...
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I probably shouldn't have tried to write a DOTS post a couple hours after coming home from a crazy weekend of racing, but I did... and totally spaced on the Truck Monday tradition. Not that the Datsun 1200 isn't a great car, but we're supposed to have a truck here to start our week, dammit! To make up for that screwup, I'm going with a truck I've been saving for a special occasion: a rusty, crusty survivor straight from the Alaskan bush! You don't see a lot of Alaskan plates in Alameda (Hawaiian ones used to be fairly common, with the huge Navy base on the island and many sailors bringing cars from the islands); this truck seems to have become a permanent resident, so we'll probably see boring ol' California plates on it one of these days. I like to imagine this thing grinding down some icy dirt road with a bunch of tools rattling in the back. I'm not sure whether "Scout II Traveler," "Scout Traveler," or just "Traveler"...
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We've only seen two trucks from our favorite farm equipment maker so far in this series (the '48 KB-2 and the '80 Scout ), but those aren't the only International Harvesters on the island. Here's a '76 Scout II (equipped with a warlord-style camouflage paint job) that I spotted in the same East End neighborhood as the '84 Plymouth Reliant . Though the overall look of this truck is incongruous in a neighborhood full of crypto-Mission style turn-of-the-century bungalows, but wait until the Final Days are upon us and the atomic fire rains from the skies! Then this Scout will be full of freeze-dried food and ammo, headed at top speed for the compound in the mountains and leaving the rest of us to fight over charred rat carcasses in the rubble. And what better soundtrack for that drive to the compound than a little Bad Religion? Or maybe it's just an especially menacing commuter vehicle with single-digit gas mileage. galleryPost('DOTS76IHCScout', 14, '1976...
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