You know what the problem is with this country? You can no longer buy road vehicles made by a manufacturer of farm equipment, that's what's wrong! Maybe it's time for Ford to bring back the Fordson tractor, though that wouldn't be the same. I was reminded of the sad lack of vehicles with combine harvesters in their lineage when I ran across this 1980 IH Scout, and since our last few DOTS trucks were a GMC, a Ford, and a Dodge, today seemed like a good time to go with a non-Big Three American truck.
Unless someone has grafted the grille off an '80 onto an earlier Scout II here, we're looking at the very last year of the Scout. This one has the optional Nissan 6-33T turbocharged diesel, which was good for 101 horsepower and 175 ft-lbs of torque. Oh yes, and it's the "Limited Edition," which means that less than an infinite quantity of them was available.
This one is in very nice condition- not a speck of rust and a very clean interior. Don't worry, lovers of beat-to-hell Scouts- I've found a trashed one a couple miles away, and you'll be seeing it in this series.
I'm not enough of a Scout expert to know whether this huge winch-ready bumper was a factory option. It looks cool, aftermarket or not.
And did IH offer a shiny chromed spare wheel cover? Hard to imagine a maker of hay balers doing such a thing. In any case, a very nice truck; the only way to improve it would be to convert it to run on pure vegetable oil- hey, it's an International Harvester, so it needs to run on crops!