Junkyard Find: 1972 International Harvester Scout II
Here in Colorado, Scouts are all over the place, which means that Denver-area wrecking yards get a steady stream of worn-out or abandoned examples. So far in this series, we’ve seen this ’70, this ’71, this ’73, and this ’74, and I’ve skipped over a bunch of totally-stripped Scouts that weren’t worth photographing. Today’s find has donated a lot of parts to the local Scout ecosystem, but still intact enough to be of interest.
The IHC V8 was a heavy, farm-equipment-grade brute. There’s probably some easy way to tell a 304 from a 345 at a glance, but I don’t know what it is.
The smog sticker says it’s a 345, but owners of these trucks have always been notorious engine-swappers. Hey, why is there a California catalyst sticker on a ’72? This junkyard goes by VIN records when determining model year, so I suspect that some VIN-swapping magic was performed by a previous owner and we’re really looking at a late-70s Scout.
IHC made a Rallye version of the Scout II, but this looks like a homegrown decal job.
It’s not incredibly rusty, but there’s no reason to restore a truck like this when you can buy nicer runners for reasonable prices in Colorado.
Does everything a compact, big sedan, or station wagon can do!
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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My crazy recluse great uncle has an '80 Scout that he bought brand new. It was his daily driver until it rotted out, then he spent a not-so-small fortune on a frame-off restoration of it. I saw it a couple of years ago, and it was probably nicer than any of them ever were new. He only drives it in the summer now. My great uncle lives in an "off grid" cabin up in Western Maine, with a TON of guns including some kind of WWII towed machine gun that he had to get a special permit for. I fully expect to hear of a massacre at the local town hall someday with all his neighbors saying on the news "he was a quiet man who kept to himself"... He's probably pushing 75 now.
The tin worm gets 'em all in the end.... A sad thing , this one looks restorable to me . FWIW , NO ONE actually wants rust free old Scout (or anything else) bodies ~ I grew up Down East and so know rusty vehicles very well , when I moved to So. Cal. , I decided to try selling old rust free if raggedy collector vehicles and wasn't even able to GIVE THEM AWAY ! current tags & titles even . I parted out most of them and so didn't loose my @$$ but it was a real eye opener as I'm always building up some old nail or another and the body & rust are the primary lookouts to me . -Nate