First use of the bus

It wasn't all that exciting but I did take the bus out on a 30 mile round trip a couple of days ago. There are some lights that need attention namely an indicator and a headlamp. One of the back tyres looks in rougher shape than I'd first thought. The tread looks in danger of delaminating. Fortunately that's just one tyre.

The trip was simply helping my friend move house. Her niece declared "I know I'm a redneck but moving house with a schoolbus is more redneck than I am". Now that was amusing.

In other news, the rear shelf has two broken welds and is secured to the bus via an I beam that runs halfway down the length of the bus. It's bolted to the back bumper. The i beam is welded to the bottom of the back bumper and there are two square section tubes welded to each side of the bus. Basically, it's going to take a few hours with an angle grinder to remove that mess. Once that is removed I have to get the rest of the I girder off.

The interior remodeling will take a while to remove also. This is a bigger project than I had initially anticipated. My original plans involved using the cupboards down the one side. Since they're all contaminated with rodent filth, they're best gone. Plywood is cheap enough and doing it myself will guarantee a certain level of insulation.

I'm going over various ideas for the windows and the cheapest seems to be plywood faced with resin then painted over. It is probably not ideal though. The decider on that will be the availability of waterproof rivets. If the rivets and some decent 1.5 - 2mm thick steel are not available or not available at a price I'm willing to pay then the answer could well be plywood and Torx screws.

The first purchase will be a headlamp bulb and an indicator lamp bulb together with an angle grinder. The bus horn does not appear to work so replacing it with the one left in a drawer in the bus is a quick job to do. That's probably going to be my first set of completed tasks.

While I dislike the rear shelf intensely, it makes more sense to get the interior of the bus livable first in order that I can move into it sooner. Of course, that depends largely on the inside of the bus being emptied of items transported in it while helping my friend move house.