Milestone Week
We hit a milestone this week! The transition is complete! Finally all the skinning is done!!! It sure was not easy to get the transition in place. We first tried to make a paper mold. That blew everywhere and did not deliver good results. Then we tried to hoist a piece of plywood up there. That did not do any good either. Lastly, we cut one of the sheets at 65 inches, hoisted those 60 pounds of steel up onto the bus and marked it with a 1 ½ inch piece of steel at the bottom, following the curvature of the bus. We took the steel plate back down and used the electric scissors to cut that curvature and one side of the sheet to make sure it would lay straight along the center support. Then we hoisted the sheet back up there. Quite the exercise I must say. We used two ratchet straps to make the steel curve over the supports.
Making it fit
Following we screwed down the bottom of the sheet, letting the steel fold itself over the transition supports. Then we screwed in the side above the drivers window. In the end, there was so much curve in the steel that we had to make an angled cut to release the pressure and then continued screwing the plate down. We then made several vertical cuts on top of the bus and folded all the little steel flaps over the existing roof and screwed them down as well. Then we welded all those cuts back together in the hope to prevent future water leaks.
We repeated the process for the passenger side of the transition, which turned out a lot better. I guess we learn by doing. Murphy’s law dictated that we ran out of screws just before completion. Since we already emptied the Alvin and Pearland Depots of the steel screws we needed, a trip to the Bay Area Home Depot was necessary to deplete their stock as well.
Accidents happen
Having learned from our past rust-mistake, we wire wheeled the steel, vacuumed all the steel remains and dusted off the bus roof. While doing that, I lost my balance and proceeded to crash down with the ladder, shopvac and cleaner liquid bottle in hand. I really noticed that additional 20 inches of air space we created with the roof raise when that happened; it gave me that additional few hundreds of a second to realize that the landing after an 11 foot drop was really going to hurt….
So we had to fix the ladder, re-assemble the vacuum and re-clean the storage space since there now was dust everywhere. Then we could get back on task and wipe the rust remover on the steel followed by degreasing the steel using the now broken bottle of cleaning liquid and then we put on a first coat of primer. Quite satisfying I must say…
One more coat of primer and then we can slowly start to put the bus back together!