Finishing up from last week
This week we finished the framing for the RV window. Of course, one of the verticals was just 3” too short, so we pieced two pieces together. In the end it turned out nice. Always a challenge to weld in the driver seat area since we set the steering wheel and blinker on fire before…
We also welded an insert above the door so we could mount the new steel against it. Then we added the drip rail and welded it all together. Little paint on it and it looks decent. On the driver side we did the same thing above the window.
Time is not our friend
Then we had a few days of not being able to go to the bus. When we came back, we noticed a very unpleasant surprise. We decided to wait until the entire bus was covered in sheet metal before painting. However, as everything tends to do with all the activities we are involved in, it has taken much longer than anticipated to get all the steel in place. Being on the gulf coast, bare steel is a bad thing. Though we are in an enclosed storage, it is not climate controlled. Bare steel + gulf coast humidity = RUST!
Especially where we had touched the steel with bare hands quite heavy oxidation had started. This resulted in a lot of additional work. We had to buy and apply a rust remover, then wire brush all the sections of steel, followed by more rust remover and then a degreaser. After that we applied two coats of primer. Would have been so much faster if we would have cleaned and primed right after installation….
We hope we got it all the rust removed and cleaned properly so the paint won’t be peeling off in a year. Now all that is done, we can go back to our transition piece. Keeping a timeline seems to be very hard during this project. I am starting to wonder if the skoolie converters that claim they converted in a month actually did the work themselves….
