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I’m a sucker for pain—a glutton for punishment—and I think my affinity for questionable old trucks proves that. Still, I had a much-needed moment of clarity last year and unloaded most of my fleet. I kept my 1966 Ford dump truck, don’t worry, but I sold the 2.5-ton International Harvester Loadstar and the non-operating IH Travelall that I infamously bought sight-unseen, only to discover an airbrushed Zombie mural on the tailgate. Well, the person who bought my Travelall is selling it now and I have a strange, unfamiliar feeling.
Seller’s remorse is as real as buyer’s remorse, but I with the Travelall, I only felt the latter. It’s not like I had that much money in it; I scooped it up for just $1,500 and I barely touched it in my year of ownership. And that’s why I’m not tempted to buy it back.
Don’t get me wrong: There are several rigs I regret letting go of, like my first truck with the 7.3-liter Power Stroke. But the Travelall helped me realize I’m not the kind of guy who can keep a bunch of 50-year-old machinery running all the time. Heck, I never got the thing to fire once, though I hardly ever tried. Buying it was pure excitement but month after month of seeing it parked brought me pretty low, to be honest. The same can be said of the Loadstar, which had sat long enough to be hidden by weeds when I finally sold it.
I’m OK with not being that project guy. Really, I’m more than OK with it, because I’d rather hang out with my family than bust my knuckles and get angry that the dang thing still isn’t fixed. I know that’s how a lot of us made memories with our dads—it’s a great way to do exactly that—but for my family, I feel like there are better ways to go about it. There’s more to that story that I look forward to telling soon as I get back to writing about my F600.
If you’re interested in taking on the project, the Travelall is located in Northwest Arkansas. The 241-cubic-inch inline-six needs some work to get going again as it won’t turn over, and the interior is slapped together as you can see in the pictures. Even then, it was last tagged in 2015 so it hasn’t been off the road for that long. There’s rust—it’s an International, after all—though nobody should expect perfection from a classic 4×4 that’s listed for less than $5,000.
I hope it lives again someday, with or without its killer paint job. But it’ll have to be someone else who revives it, because I’ll be spending my free time swimming at the creek with my kiddos.
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