Fair progress

Over the weekend, some progress was made but the cry as ever is that not enough was done. The first plastic plank was cut and bolted down There was a major holdup in that the previous owner had poured copious quantities of some kind of silicon goop beside all the plywood they had laid and this had to be removed. Removing it was more time consuming than it needed to be.

The silicon goop was about an inch thick and as I'd seen a silicon remover spray, I bought some under the illusion that it might actually have worked. Sprayed onto the silicon, it made the silicone slippery and smelly but had no tangible effect other than that of making a mess. Definitely not a desirable result! It took a day for that stuff to dry, during which I looked at the electrical system and installed two new switches on the dashboard and rewired the old top strobe switch.

The top strobe switch now operates a reversing camera screen. The camera has not yet been installed as the cable provided was a mere 20 feet long and the bus is 40 feet. A new cable was obtained from Radio Shack and I'll have to return to Radio Shack for some more switches since I need to replace the windscreen-wiper switch.

While I was thinking about passing the wiring, I remembered that I have yet to do trailer lighting and an internal power cable for USB services. Good job I remembered those. I can put the whole bundle together to save time. The trailer cable gives me the most problems as I'd like to do it with a single cable with relays but this might not be possible. I might well end up having to run a bundle of cables - possibly as many as five for:
1 Braking light circuit,
2 Rear red circuit,
3 Two circuits for the amber flashers,
4 Sidelights.
Add in a USB power cable and the camera cables and the bunch of wiring quickly becomes massive.

So, I ripped up the old silicon goop with a screwdriver. None of the other methods actually worked. Having done that, there was an angled piece of metal at 45 degrees between the floor and wall. That meant that to lie flat, the boards had to be an inch away from the wall and new silicon goop laid. In turn this meant that my cuts to the plywood were an inch short of where they needed to be. The upshot to that was the fourth and final plank never got laid. As there's rust visible on the exposed metal, that will have to be treated before new goop can be put down.

I took a couple of drives in the bus over the weekend. One to get a plastic plank and some treated 2x4 for the bath mounting and one to visit the locksmith. The locksmith put his thinking hat on and will get back to me with his ideas for bus locks.

The wood for the bath mount is quite moist to the touch and required thus to be left in the bus to dry out. The upshot was that not as much as I wanted to do was done but that's the whole song of the bus conversion.