Junkyard Find: 1974 International Harvester Scout
With so many IHC Scouts here in Colorado, many of them wear out, rust out, get crashed, or get replaced by trucks with modern conveniences such as sub-100dB interior noise levels and air conditioning. In this series, we’ve seen this ’70, this ’71, this ’72, this ’73, and this ’74, and now today’s well-used ’74. I saw this truck when I went to a Denver yard to celebrate Half Off Everything Day on the first day of the new year.
If this is the original engine, it’s an AMC 258-cubic-inch straight-six. Given how Scout owners tend to mix-and-match engines, though, this could be just about any AMC six.
There’s rust. Oh yes, plenty of rust.
One good thing about trucks of this era is that there wasn’t much soft material in the interior to smell bad. Still, this Scout’s final owner decided that the truck needed That New Car Smell.
Complicated heater controls aren’t needed— just good old cable-operated levers.
Scout production made it into the 1980s, just barely.
One of my accomplices at the Half Off Sale party grabbed the grille for hanging on his living-room wall. Only $12!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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International Harvester's own "Black Diamond" 220 cid and 240 cid OHV long-stroke inline sixes were TRUCK engines, and weighed more than a big-block Chevy V8 engine (750 pounds). They were also too long for the Scout chassis. To save money (I presume), IHC began buying AMC sixes for their full-sized pickups in 1969 and added the option to the Scout, since the engine fit and some folks wanted something other than the very rough slant-four, or the super-tough IHC V8. Yes, these were indistructible - except against rust!
I actually just remembered that there is a Scout for sale, not too far from here, that is the rarest of them all! A 1980 Scout II with a Nissan SD33T turbodiesel! Now that's something Murilee should try and find.