58 OCTOBER 20194-WHEEL & OFF-ROAD 4WHEELOFFROAD.COM
A
S JERRY REED’S OLD “EAST
Bound and Down” theme
song to Smokey and the
Bandit goes, “We got a long
way to go, and a short time
to get there.” No matter how
much advance planning
happens, there never seems to be enough
time for magazine builds in general and
Ultimate Adventure builds in particular.
As usual the clock was ticking fast when
we announced our eccentric International
Scout 80 would be the official build to
tackle the 20th anniversary of Ultimate
Adventure. The beginning of these builds
also means waiting on parts, and many of
these parts have lead times, which unfor-tunately doesn’t do our tight timetable
any favors. Regardless, it was time to kick
this project into high gear.
The most time - consuming par t of most
vehicle builds is the custom fabrication.
Sure, drivetrain assembly can be compli-
cated, but hand-fabricating stuff and doing
it right is a time suck that’s hard to get
around. Shockingly, there’s not a lot of off-
the-shelf stuff available for a 1964 Scout
80, which meant we were going to be large-
ly on our own for things like the rollcage,
body armor, and suspension mounts.
We decided to dive headlong into the
fabrication side of things while waiting for
parts to trickle in, and so with this install-
ment we tackle the bulk of the rollcageand body armor fabrication with the help
of some raw materials from Industrial
Metal Supply. We’ve run a fair number
of rollcage fabrication articles recently,
so instead of walking you through how
to build a rollcage, we focus on how we
applied those techniques we detailed
in other ar ticles to this par ticular build.
There are also some hints towards the end
about what’s in store for the next phase
of the build, which involves swinging the
drivetrain into the Scout and starting on
the suspension.
We’re cautiously optimistic about the
progress we’ve made so far, but as Jerr y
reminds us, there’s still a long way to go
and not much time to get there.