Not much of anything

Today was one of those days where more could have got done had I not been exhausted by five 12-hour days plus a busy Saturday.

The first thing that was done was to pour more of the white powder mix into the mold with a sample aluminium plate in place. I did test the white stuff with a blowtorch and while it glowed, it did not change colour. It is definitely soft so I'll have to see what exactly it does with the aluminium when I try to weld.

Having poured the mix over the aluminium in the mold it did cure as stated in about an hour but it was a couple of hours later when I scraped the white stuff back to reveal the aluminium plate. I did try to move the aluminium but the white stuff started to come up too. Perhaps I should have sprayed it with some kind of mold oil? I left the aluminium in place and put the whole lot in the bus. Maybe some heating/cooling cycles will have the desired effect. If not, I can pry the aluminium out and see how good the mold is.

Next, I pulled out the metal I had painted last time and cut it to size to fit over the cable hole above the current camera mount. I'll have to drill rivet holes later as I still need to fit it more precisely.

Finally, above the bed, in the bedroom, I caulked the edges of the board inserted where I did have accessible windows and removed the four roller blind mounts. That'll make a big difference. When I slept in the bus last time I was in danger of clonking my head on those things. Being pointy, metal and sharp there was a risk of hitting an eye on one of those. Definitely not safe. Now they're gone.

I'll have to slap some pink paint on the edges - and a couple of places where the paint isn't so good and then I'll say that area is completed.

As far as the metal cover over the cable hole is concerned, that will be done another day. It's not a big job but I just didn't feel like hefting the stepladder nor climbing it today. As for the aluminium, I'll probably get to that next weekend. I need to do a test weld first. This is all experimental so far. If the test weld turns out OK then I'll buy some longer pieces of aluminium that I can join for real and see how that works out. The aim, as ever, is to cover all of the windows with three wide aluminium bars painted white. That way the bus will look ever more like a prison bus.