I listened to the idjuts online!

Pride comes before a fall and I was so proud of my nicely cut and painted sheet of steel. It looked so pretty in the bright sunlight and I wanted to locate it where it needed to go for final fitting. I wasn't going to mount it today because of the forecast rain. Needless to say as I write this after stopping work for the day, the rain is coming down in spades.

Knowing there was going to be an issue getting the first sheet level, it seemed a good idea to make a wooden support. That didn't take much time at all and my template was a great help.

As I was going to be working with an angle grinder and sand blaster on the outside, I put my old sheet of fridge steel back on the inside. That looked pretty good and would save me a lot of mess inside or, rather, would help me not make the mess inside worse.

After I put the steel pack on the inside I had a nasty thought that the steel looked bigger than the nicely cut and painted piece. I removed the interior steel and held the new piece of steel up against the window aperture. On the inside I can see the aperture. On the outside I cannot. It turned out that the nicely drilled rivet holes top and bottom went to empty space. That was quite crushing!

I pulled out all the other pieces of steel and held them up against their respective windows. They were fine from top to bottom but side to side they were narrow. The problem was that I had not allowed adequate space to put rivets. The bus body manufacturer put their rivets on 3/4 inch in from the edge of the steel and used 1/2 inch head rivets. Thus, half an inch of steel flat extends beyond the rivet on the edges. While I could use narrow head rivets, I want to keep in line with what the body manufacturer did. That way I know I'm getting a decent construction standard.

So, all the steel sheet is too small. That's $186 of steel BUT all is not lost. I'm nowhere near going broke. Anybody that says school bus conversion is something a pauper can do is fooling only themselves. A service on a school bus is $1,000. Tires are $300 each and that's for cheap tires. The do 8 miles to the gallon. None of that is pauper world.

With all the money I'm saving by not going out and not eating out due to Covid-19 this extra steel isn't costing much. If I spend another $200 then that's about 20 visits to Hardees or Tokyo Grill. It's about six fill ups at the filling station or a combination of those. In fact based on my filling up every 2 weeks normally and visiting restaurants for lunch, it's more like 2 weeks of general living - which I don't need to do due to Covid-19.

So, I've inquired about more steel from the same place. The 14 gauge I have can be used in so many ways. I believe I can weld it but I don't want to weld over windows for fear of more warpage. I was thinking about how much this door has cost so far...

In the beginning I was advised by somebody I thought might be right, online, that a DC stick welder would be the right thing to use. All I had was an AC stick welder. I have to say that the DC stick welder didn't really do the job. That created more problems. Having said that I've used that DC stick welder for other things and it beats the pants off my AC welder. That was $160 reasonably well spent.

Of course as soon as I mentioned the problems with the stick welder, the idjuts online said I needed a wire welder. Thinking it unlikely I did look into it and figured that at $125 the Harbor Freight wire welder wasn't too bad. That, as it turned out, loved to spit balls of steel everywhere. It was pretty much like the AC stick welder on a bad day with a 6011 rod. It also liked to burn through steel which was not what I was expecting. It'd be fine for fixing farm gates but that's about it.

Looking on the bleak side I could say I'm down $285 on welders that won't do the back door (which is what I wanted to do) and $186 on steel that I can't use for the back door. Now the steel is entirely my fault because I measured to fit the apertures and a bit more but didn't allow enough to clear the apertures and allow space for rivets and space the other side of the rivets. So though I'm down near $500 on the back door without a final solution, I'm not despondent. The DC welder is definitely a keeper. The wire welder - well - I've not used that successfully yet and I'm still on the Harbor Freight reel of wire that was supplied with it. Perhaps the other reel will work differently. I'm not going to pull the reel off though just to change reels as the reel would likely get snarled.

The steel - I have wanted decent steel for a while. I can definitely use the sheet steel. While by the time I have done the back door and the windows each side of it, it will have cost in excess of $700 and would have been cheaper for me to go crawling to some backstreet welder dude with BO, an offensive tee-shirt, too many questions and an obvious meth habit but I have done everything on the bus myself so far. It has been my project and at the end of all this I want to be able to say proudly and honestly I did ALL this by MYSELF. Yes, there have been things I've had to do and redo and change but I did them by myself without having any help most of the way.

As far as the welders are concerned, I do regret buying the wire welder. The DC welder is a great improvement over the AC welder in that now I can actually use 3/32 welding rods.

The steel company probably won't put the order through until at least the Thursday so it could be Friday before I get the steel. Thus I'm free now to change the roof vent. I'd been wary about that just in case I needed to put a steel collar under it - who knows what the roof is like sunder it since the vent is rusty. I had no supply of decent steel to put as a patch. Now I do. So, if it's a decent day tomorrow then I might get that done and then wash the bus roof before putting more of the elastometric paint up there. It'll be the first try out for my air riveter.

Building the wooden frame for the support for the back door panel that wasn't to be, my Harbor Freight cordless drill was making a real racket. The jaws opened enough for the drill bit to slide up inside the chuck an amazing distance. When it dies which won't be long now, I might replace it with an air drill. It's getting to the point when I need to mount an air tank under the bus to power tools etc. I'm pretty sure a standard 12v tyre pump with a better air-cooling system would be the compressor. I'll have to give that more thought.