Finally tackling the little things
Last week we finally managed to get all the remaining chairs disassembled so we could get some of the inside roofing and chair frames to the scrap yard. A small trailer load of 500lbs of steel gave us a whapping $30.- of income…
Final driveway prep
Later that week we brought the bus into the driveway to pressure wash it for storage. We also grinded some of the roof rivets off. We then marked the cutting line so we can determine what exactly needs to be dismantled for the roof raise.
Sunday was finally the day we have been waiting for; our enclosed storage unit was ready! Now we have two months to get the roof raise as well as the skinning done before storage get too expensive. We loaded the bus up with all the tools and material we will need, including the raise insets and raise supports that have been in our bedroom for the past six months.
Prep work is underway
We had some happy helpers this week. R started to take out the windows while N collected all the screws, bagged them and marked them. The driver side window took us a while to take out since we have not done that before. In the end, we did get it out
We took off the doors, which were much heavier than anticipated. After that, the door jams were removed.
Then we removed the emergency roof hatches and dismantled the air conditioning from the roof.
We placed the floor jacks with the premade frames to make sure they will work.
Cutting has started
Then it was time to take out the front section of the roof. This will become a transition section. Even though we measured, once we started cutting, we noticed we had hit the fiberglass of the front roof cover. Can’t really change our minds at that point so we completed the entire cut. Now we have a little less than two months to figure out how to mount the transition piece without creating leaks. It’s a future problem.
We figured that when the rivets were grinded off and the front cut was made, we could just easily lift the top section off. That was not the case. It took hammers and crowbars to get the roof section parted from the glue.
Now at least we are sure that any leaks we had were all related to the rivets and not the caulking cracks of the adjacent roof sections. It will take a while to clean all the glue remains off so we will have a proper welding surface…
For the coming days we have more dismantling to do, followed by measurements so we can get the skinning steel.