TEXT BY: CHRISTIAN GLAZAR PHOTOS: BRANDON LAJOIE
eorge Tsingos bought his 1977 Scout Traveler by mistake. It’s not that he didn’t intend to purchase a Scout vehicle; he just didn’t realize they came in such an array of configurations. So, when his online purchase showed up in his driveway on a flatbed in the middle of the night, the first thing he noticed was the long, 118-inch wheelbase that separates the Scout Traveler from the more common Scout II™.
“Well, whatever,” he said, according to his daughter and co-conspirator, Sofi. “I paid 750 bucks for it and it came with a title.” They were still excited for their new project, and happy to have it home.
“The truckdriver gets it unloaded, and we realize it has SO much rust,” Sofi laughs. “Just layers and layers of Bondo.” One fender had been repaired with cardboard. Still, George and Sofi were undaunted — they thrive on tackling the toughest challenges together.
Sofi is the owner of Texas-based GT-Moto and GT-Interiors, creative outlets inspired by everything Sofi learned while following George around his aircraft maintenance shop and their garage at home when she was a child. Aircraft mechanics are fastidious; settling for anything less than perfection may be catastrophic. It’s an ethos George passed along to Sofi as they worked side-by-side on their own cars and motorcycles, and one that became a hallmark of her own as she built a career as a technician, welder, and fabricator in motorcycle service departments and hot rod shops.
"One day I found him tinkering in the garage. He only had enough strength to put on a couple bolts, but that seemed to kind of get him out of his depression and out of his head."
Around 2013, George was diagnosed with lymphoma, and given only four months to live. Surgery and radiation, intended to buy him some time, left him frail and exhausted. “One day I found him tinkering in the garage,” Sofi recalls. “He only had enough strength to put on a couple bolts, but that seemed to kind of get him out of his depression and out of his head.”
She decided then and there to build a motorcycle with him, a project that would give them precious time together and serve as a kind of joint therapy. Regardless of how long it took, they would build it the way they wanted it to — and then raffle it off to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. More than a decade later, George is still with us, and supporting the fight to find a cure for cancer is embedded in the mission of GT-Moto, whose builds have raised tens of thousands of dollars for the cause.
GT-Interiors also has its origins in overcoming a serious health issue. “In 2016, I became really sick with an autoimmune disease — ulcerative colitis — and I just wasn’t able to physically work as many hours,” says Sofi. “My organs started failing because the lining of my intestines were shedding, so I was losing a lot of blood and I wasn’t getting nutrients … If I got too stressed out, it would keep me bedridden for months.” For about a year, she worked her dream job building hot rods, but felt that her frequent absences weren’t fair to her employer, so she quit, earned her real estate license, and started doing interior design. “I can work from home, but still be creative and help people,” she says.
Interior design now represents the majority of her business, but she and George still find time to exercise their mechanical muscle memory — as they’ve done with a certain Scout Traveler.
Sofi’s expertise with metalwork and fabricating was immediately put to the test on the rusty project truck. “We got it all down and got all of the Bondo out; we cut out all of the rest and either repaired or replaced floorboards, fenders, all of it.” George built a rig that enabled them to place the bodywork on it, move it around, and perfect the panel gaps. “If we get to the point where all we need is primer filler and maybe a little bit of a putty, then we know it’s good,” says Sofi.
There was some debate about the direction they wanted to take this build. “My dad raised me to restore things,” Sofi says. “If you have a matching-number vehicle, you restore it, you bring it back to its former glory.” But both of them have a strong affinity for hot rods, too, and George was leaning toward an LS swap from the very beginning. Sofi convinced him otherwise — at least according to George. “He wants to blame me, says that it’s my fault for convincing him to do that,” Sofi laughs.
“This was going to be the one car that we restore and flip,” Sofi says. “We have a really bad habit of doing the opposite: we usually buy, restore, and keep.” On their keepers they do almost all the mechanical work, but for a flip, it made more sense to focus on the body and paint while farming out the rebuild of the original 304 engine and 727 automatic transmission, the rear end, and the interior to other professionals. And that’s where the restore-and-flip plan started to fall apart.
“The rear end comes back and it’s not done properly, so we have to redo it,” Sofi recounts. “The motor comes back; we put it in and it makes a horrible clicking noise, like metal on metal.” They started to tear down the engine and found that the “expert” who had rebuilt hundreds of Scout engines hadn’t replaced the rocker arms. After they sourced re-plated rocker arms, the 304 still wouldn’t run right.
That’s when George decided that they were going to do an LS swap after all. And that he was going to keep the Scout vehicle for himself when it was done. He shipped it to a shop in Northern California, and let them know what his expectations were.
“I’m going to leave it with you guys, and when it’s done, I’m going to fly back here and drive it back home to Dallas,” George told them. “I’m going to get the phone number of your wife, your children, your mother, your father —anybody that can get ahold of you — and if anything happens where I’m stuck on the side of the road and you’re not answering your phone, I’m calling everybody else.”
When he picked it up, he noticed a handful of things they hadn’t done as requested but decided he was done waiting, paid the shop, and hit the road.
“It started off in a blizzard in the mountains,” says Sofi. “Then he went through a rainstorm. Then a windstorm. He said it was the most uncomfortable drive he’s ever done in his entire life.” This coming from someone who once drove a classic Range Rover in Panama, slid off a muddy dirt road, and ended up on his roof in a river.
The Scout vehicle acquitted itself quite well on the return trip, with one exception. “He had to have a company overnight him a new fuel pump, and he had to drop the tank because they didn’t cut open a quick access cover like he asked them to do,” Sofi says. George knew the 35-gallon gas tank was essentially a prototype designed for the 6.2-liter LS3 swap into a Scout vehicle, and still might have some bugs to work out. “He understood that … that’s why he asked them to cut a hole,” laughs Sofi.
He made it back home, and now the project is in that open-ended, tinker-and-refine phase that any automotive or motorcycle enthusiast likely relates to. For example, he wants to put in a roll cage and full seat belts instead of relying on the factory lap belts. But this is no garage queen.
“We’ve been driving it as it came back from California, and other than the fuel pump issue, it’s been incredible,” Sofi says. “It’s kind of a daily driver. We take it to different events, offroad events, car shows, getting groceries, hauling parts … “ It also may serve as a platform to get Sofi and George — and GT-Moto — more involved in the offroad scene.
After the journey Sofi and George took to get their Scout Traveler to where it is today, Sofi is adamant that flipping it is off the table. “It’s just too cool to get rid of,” she laughs.
