Avoiding Future "Oops" Moments

Michael is full of great ideas. One of them was to document the bus's inner workings before we put back the old walls, new ceiling and new floor. Brilliant, right? Well I set out not only to taking photos of the general layout, but also taking pictures of framework with a measuring tape in the photo. Then Michael one-upped himself and suggested we VIDEO tape our measuring the bus. Here's a sample of what we were doing:

Click to play V I D E O: Sample Measurements

Rust-Be-Gone!!!

Working on this bus has given me a clearer picture on how to combat rust. When I was first grinding it off the walls, I was trying to take it off completely. WRONG! My goal was to just expose a layer by roughing it up. Chemicals sold at our nearby Fleet Farm were going to stop the deterioration once we brushed a coat of it on the scruffed-up rust.

Wherever the rust and this "rust coverter" met a black paint emerged a day later.

Now the second step was to cover the converted rust with paint. Uncle Frankie had the best solution - his shelf of salvaged spray paint! He likes to go to the local dump yard and get cans that people are trying to get rid of. Based on the graphics of what we found, these cans might have dated back to the 60s! And so many of them were full. 

Why did people not want these? They were probably done with them after they used a smidgen for a project. Some had broken nozzles and their previous owner didn't know the miracles of paint thinners. Who cares I thought. It saved us so much money to use them because we ended up spraying painting every part of the bus frame - even parts that didn't have rust! We used about 25 cans of spray paint and it was all free!

For a while, our bus looked as if a bunch of hippies had vandalized it in the middle of the night, but it was ok. It was going to be covered up with our new floor anyway. 

Demolition - Subfloor

Removing the fasteners took sooooo long that it was such a glorious feat to take off the plywood subfloor. 

Here's our reaction to uncovering the first board ...

Click to play V I D E O: Bus Demo - Subfloor

We had been debating whether or not to pull up the floor, but we were glad at this point to do it. We found some rust towards the front, we discovered that Michael had room to move his gear shifter from the right side to the left (more on that in another post), and we generally learned more about what we were dealing with. It was a bear of a chore to lift up that sucker, but now we knew we could put a new, more soundproof floor back in.

There was also the issue of taking off the seat tracks which were welded to the center chase's metal frame. Taking them out would mean that we could lay the new subfloor more easily. But we were fearful (and pooped) that taking out those rails would be another multi-day labor. Michael asked advice on a bus conversion forum and was told it was pretty easy.

To take off the welds, we had to use two grinders. One heavy mother-effer that only Michael could handle. It was so big and solid that Michael used this nylon strap as a sort of necklace that relieved his hands of some of the weight. It had belonged to his grandfather! Back in the day, factories made their tools out of steel man! Not the aluminum and plastic we see these days! Anyway, Michael used that get as much of the welds off as he could. 

Since his grinder was so humongous and thick, however, we needed to switch to a smaller, 4" version to get in between the frame and the rail. The smaller one also let us do the job without accidentally cutting any of those cables in the center chase. We still hadn't figured out which ones were important. I think this added volumes of sweat when I was working near those cables. Michael warned that if I knicked the wrong one (e.g., the cable that carries the gas from the tank to the engine), the bus could be rendered immobile! ACK, the pressure.

Taking the welds off turned out to be not too bad of an endeavor. It took a while for me to get used to the task because I was applying too much pressure and consequently causing the grinder's engine to work harder. Michael would hear it struggle, give me tips on how to properly use it, and then give me a second-, third- and fourth chance at wielding it. By the time I finished the welds however I felt I had just gotten into a groove that I was looking around at what else I could grind off! Fun times!


Dick once again gave great advice. He has converted 5 busses and one fire engine and knows some great tricks on doing things with less effort. Once we had pried off about 4' of the track. We would bend it to about 45 degrees from the floor level and then swing it wildly from side to side. This motion used the weight of the freed portion of the track to pry off the next weld without our exerting ourselves! I was so greatful to Dick for all his help that I wanted to give him a gift to say thanks. I found a nice bottle of port but didn't know that he had been dry for so many years now! D'oh! But he was gracious and said that his wife would enjoy it. 

Demolition - Finish Floor and Fasteners

Insulation galore! This was only half of the insulation we pulled out. Dick periodically came by to advise Michael and would always leave with some sort of trash to dump or items to salvage. Needless to say, he dumped the insulation somewhere.
Dick told us about Michael's dad and how he notoriously would dump garbage in certain places around the Twin Cities. Bear, as his friends and family called him, had a beef with neighboring Scott County and made sure that his "deposits" would always sit on a roadside that was in any unincorporated city of said county. Mind you, Bear was very neat about it and would stack his trash in a tidy and tall pile. But ever opportunistic to be a thorn in the side of those on his shit list (Hmmm ... much like his progeny ...), he made sure it was the county who would have to pick up the trash.

Back to the bus ...

The existing flooring was a thick rubber glued to a plywood subfloor. Here's how our removal of the finish floor went. 

Click to play V I D E O: Floor Demo - Rubber Flooring

What a godsend the air compressor is! Before Michael had time to show me how to use the tools, I tried to use a paint scraper thinking my muscles would do the trick. Pshaw!!!! My teeny tiny mushells were no match to the power that an air hammer has!!!

After the rubber flooring, we had to find all the screws and bolts. Because we only had one air compressor, we split the work. I manually took off the screws with a screwdriver. Michael would use the air hammer to dislodge some of the ornery screws. I'd say 35% of them were like that. He also used the tool of magic to loosen these fasteners that I like to refer to as "the ticks of the construction world." 

Their round head has been notched and bent in two places to create these "teeth" that locks into the plywood. Michael first tried to drill through the head, but that took so long. Enter again the air hammer, which Michael used to tear up the wood around the bold heads. Once exposed, he had leverage to use the hammer to just chop off the head. We should have recorded these blogs sooner because we now can't remember if it took us 3 or 5 days to get all the screws off. It was a looooong time. So long, in fact, that we skipped doing all the bolts, left about 15 % still on, and tore off the plywood in frustration.

Click to play V I D E O: Bus Demo - Floor - fasteners 

Here's a little clip of the destruction that lay outside the bus after the rubber flooring was removed

Click to play V I D E O: The Destruction

Demolition - Walls and Ceiling

When we arrived at Minneapolis, I immediately phoned Michael so he could pick us up. He told us his mom would be waiting for us at baggage claim and that he would be bringing a metal chariot to pick us up outside. He said,


"Look out for a 35' bus. You can't miss it!"



I couldn't. Here is the interior of the bus when he picked us up.

We started work on the bus immediately - well ... immediately after Memorial Day. On the national holiday, Dick (Michael's dad's best friend) visited us and gave us such great advice on how to convert the bus. Invaluable advice like "save all the screws and label everything."

Save all the screws, nuts, bolts, etc.

and L A B E L everything!

Since we were going to tear down the walls (to remove the insulation and treat any rust) and then put them back up, we had to label the panels. "S" is for starboard, and the numbers started from the front of the bus and ended in the back. On the other side we used "P" for port. There was one set of things we didn't label and it bit us in the butt a month later. We didn't know that the latches for the windows were individually bored in!

We took out insulation from every pore of the bus. The ceiling frame had batt insulation within the hollow metal parts! My little fingers came in handy because I was able to get at the little pieces here and there. Michael had given up on the task and moved on to other manly things like grinding the rivets off, taking out the spare tire, and tearing off the wall panels.

Removing the rivets was a two-parter. After grinding off the rivets from the outside, we had to pop off the stems that were left within the wall frames.

This hammer, among many other tools from Uncle Frankie's workshop, came in handy in doing all the demolition.

The picture above shows the walls and ceilings demo-ed. We had toiled with the decision to take out the floor or not. We thought it would take a lot of work. Was it worth it? The condition of the existing floor was pretty good as is. Sure there were holes from the air conditioning vents we were going to take out, but we could always cover them up. Maybe it wasn't worth it to tear up the floor. We only had 3 weeks left at that point. Michael's family thought it was a lot of time, but we knew there was so much more to do.