DAPtex Plus

Having replaced two windows with sheet aluminum, one window was transferred to the other side of the bus so that both the plexiglass windows which were located on one side were replaced with an aluminum window followed by a real window such that both sides had the same situation. It was reassuring to note that neither of the aluminum windows had any leaks. The seal put on the real window which was a real window seal strip was not as effective. There was a leak and a puddle underneath when I checked it after a heavy rainstorm.

Clearly the leak needed to be sealed. Grabbing a tube of silicone sealant I realised that if this was used, removing it would be awkward and would involve at the very least a heat gun. Thus I tried DAPTex plus again. I had tried DAPtex plus before and had mixed results. It seems to be a product that works occasionally but the rest of the time just makes a nasty mess that's hard to clean up and which wastes more time cleaning up than silicone sealant ever would to remove with a heat gun.

Twice I have had horrendous disasters with DAPTex plus. I cannot believe this product ever managed to slime its way onto the market. It doesn't expand and form a sealing waterproof foam. Instead it runs and dribbles and drips and then expands. It doesn't come off with a wet rag either because by the time it begins to drip and dribble, the user has long gone. This is without doubt that nastiest, most worthless product it has ever been my misfortune to spend $6 on and to my shame I bought two cans of it.

All is not lost however, the cans will make supurb rifle targets and should release a white spurt when hit with a bullet. It's a pity that the people that made this garbage aren't in front of me. Perhaps forced to clean up the God awful mess that their garbage makes, they might take it off the market so people like me won't be suckered into believing the lies on the label.

In other news, I know a mechanic and he looked at the photo of my engine and spotted what he thinks might be an oil leak. That would not surprise me and I wanted him to look over the system anyway so that should get done this weekend. His comment upon viewing the engine was that he hadn't seen one quite that old for a while. It might even be older than he is!

Plan of action

What with the toilet floor costing $50, I can quite see the bathroom floor costing $100 and the rest of the floor in that area costing another $50 or $100. The big bonus is that it will be rot proof. It was an unexpected bonus to find the original rubberized floor was still present.

The gameplan is to complete the toilet to a point where it has a toilet (of sorts), walls and a door. The next thing is to complete the shower room to a point where it has walls, the bath, a shower head and a working drain. After that it's a case of completing the bedroom. The bedroom will be completed in full.

Following completion of the bedroom, I'll work on the water and electricity supply. After that I will consider the bus to be livable and will move into it. The kitchen will be the next thing to be completed followed by the construction of the dinette.

All the time I am not living in my bus I am paying through the nose for both rent and electricity. Although my electricity is but $30 a month, it's not free unlike solar electricity. The goal is to be bill free by March or April. Now that construction has commenced, I feel that the speed of progress can only increase.

There was a suggestion that there should be a full, king or queen bed in the bus but given that the interior is but 91 inches wide and a full bed is 54 inches, a king is 76 inches and a queen is 60 inches, that really won't allow much space either side for people to get in and out. Better to have a 39 inch wide twin and maybe have bunk beds. That's something I'd been thinking about anyway. I have a quantity of stuff to store and I'd want one side of the bus dedicated to storage and wardrobe. The very back of the bus will need space for my bicycle and various tools.

I measured the bus - not the outside as that's really not too interesting - and found that my load bay is about 24 feet by about 7.5. This makes for a living area of about 180 square feet. This is definitely doable. Organisation and space optimisation is the key. My big thing is that I want a wide aisle and that cuts down on storage but does make the place feel less cramped.

Driving and buying

Somebody suggested "furing strips" as being an economical way of building things inside the bus. Today being a bright and sunny day, the first thing done today was to take the bus to Lowes. It really was a pleasant drive and I noticed something odd with the gauges.

Starting the engine (which started sweetly), the gauges all maxed then dropped to zero. Then neither the rev counter nor the speedometer read anything bar zero. Reversing, the rev counter flickered. Then after stopping, I fetched the fuse box a whack with my fist and the rev counter leapt into action and driving forward, the speedometer also worked. Clearly that must have something to do with the drip that has been falling on the fuse box. Mindful of that, later in the day I stood on the hood and sealed every conceivable place where water might be getting in bar sealing the roof vent.

At the store I had a list of things I wanted and whizzed around getting them all. Basically I was after plastic boards to use on the toilet floor, screws to fasten them to the floor, some white paint to paint the inside of the toilet and the inside of the kitchen cabinet. While I was there, having sanded the floor, it makes sense now to stain it so stain went into the basket.

Ages ago, browsing the store I'd seen plastic planking sold as vinyl siding. It was over an inch thick, eight wide and twelve feet long. Being rot proof, it sounded ideal for the toilet and shower floors. Something that sounds good as it's rot proof. It was devilishly expensive at $50 for a single plank but if it works, it's good. I also got some foaming sealant to spray around the gaps on the leaky window.

Returning from Lowes, not really feeling like doing much, I worked on the floor where I'd removed the rotted plywood. There were several screws that had refused solidly to come out even with the aid of an electric screwdriver. Most succumbed to the power of a pair of pliers. A couple didn't come out even then and met the angle grinder. Huge showers of sparks flew into piles of sawdust which I was very glad did not cause a fire.

Then, sweeping the rubbish off the floor, I noticed the door sill looked rusty. As it was plastered with silicone adhesive, that had to be pulled away and while that was being pulled away, the tarry paper I'd noticed on the floor came up. This revealed a rubberized coating which was the original Carpenter floor. Thus all the paper that wasn't covered by plywood was pulled up.

The rust was dealt with via a steel brush in the drill and then a squirt of Rustoleum Rust Converter. When that was dried, I cut the plastic plank into 3 four foot lengths and had an inch left over. The plank must have been longer than 12 feet which is excellent news. Having done that, I tried spraying foam sealant in the window gaps and the stuff just dribbled and made a hell of a mess instead of foaming. I get this with that DaptX stuff. So far it has worked well about 10% of the time. The rest of the time it just makes a terrible mess. I'm hoping it's a temperature thing. Maybe when the weather's warmer, it'll work better.

I had a fancy to put the bath in situ which I did and then felt like putting up some curtains over the kitchenette windows. The curtains were cut from a shower curtain. Being presented with the shower curtain to trim, the lady in my life looked at it and exclaimed how cheap and nasty the curtain was. There's a backstory behind that curtain of course. That was originally purchased to put with the toilet for the photo for State Farm (the bad neighbor). After State Farm welshed on the RV insurance, I had no need for the cheap dollar store shower curtains.

Having cut the curtains, I taped them into place much to the chagrin of the lady in my life. Basically, with all the reflective and plastics on the kitchen countertop I just wanted to have something to diffuse the sunlight so it didn't start fires.. It also made me feel more as though I'm getting somewhere with my bus.

Next week I want to complete the toilet and get started on the bathroom. Then I will work on the bedroom before finally the dinette.

Construction starts in earnest

Today was a day of discovery. I found that the window I transplanted is leaking around the top of the frame. I will seal that tomorrow. The seals at the front had reduced water ingress but not eliminated it. There's more yet to seal though For today though the plan was to sand the floor of the bus.

The sanding went reasonably well - not quite as well as I would have hoped because the plywood the hillbillies laid was pretty cheap stuff and full of areas that had been covered over with some kind of filler. Needless to say, I sanded down the kitchenette area to reveal fresh wood. The damage to the plywood is not something I could sand away or repair so I'll leave it as it is. In use, I'll probably install unbacked carpeting along the aisle etc that I can just whip up if it gets wet..

While I was working, it became necessary to move the kitchenette from where it was standing to where it will be located in order to free space to sand further. Having moved it into place, I found myself fastening it in the kitchenette. I still need to do a lot of fastening and particularly gluing it to the body-paneling in order to eliminate rattling as I drive.

Having secured it in place, I looked at the other stuff on the floor and decided against sanding the other side of the bus until tomorrow. For one thing, the wet patch needs to dry. I ended up removing almost all the debris that had built up, especially from removing the rotted floor panel. After that it was a case of removing most of the screws that had been holding it down. As I paused doing that, my lady managed to locate a free filing cabinet and that proved to be sufficient diversion that by the time I'd returned to the bus having picked up the filing cabinet, the light had gone.

Here are some photos from today.

The hunt for fasteners

At the moment, with internal construction about to commence in earnest, I'm looking for internal fasteners to use that are waterproof. I've heard of closed-end blind rivets but today in my hunt for some with enough length to be usable, I discovered something interesting - rivnuts. They're apparently like a rivet but have a threaded core and can be used like a nut.

It's interesting that I found rivnuts because the hillbillies that had the bus before me had used four rivnuts on one of the windows. This kind of thing has potential! Despite being just discovered by me, they have apparently been around for slightly longer than I have.

As with closed-end rivets, closed-end rivnuts look to be quite pricey. Having said that, the problem with rivets is that while it would be possible to seal the edges of a rivet against the hole it was put into using solely the natural crimping action, sealing the hole in the center is another thing entirely. This is where closed-end rivets come to play as a solution as the end is sealed and no moisture can get through.

The rivnut has two options - open and closed. As with rivets, they will seal against the hole with no problem. Sealing the thread is where issues come in. Many people will opt for the closed rivnut as a solution. The cannier individual however, will spread adhesive over each screw as it goes in and will seal the rivnuts individually.

I'm swinging in favor of the rivnut on two grounds - firstly it's easier to undo than a rivet and secondly, it looks as if they're cheaper. Cheaper is the key factor!

The donut run

Today was a day of much work. The two aluminum windows are now in situ. Both are secured with silicone caulk and 4 steel brackets each. The window from behind the driver's seat is now situated on the other side of the bus.

The people that installed the plexiglass windows had used some kind of expanding screw hole fitting which I had to grind down. Thank Heavens for my $15 Harbor Feright angle grinder. That has been a Godsend.

Standard double-glazing weather sealing strips were used to ensure a good seal around the edges. Due to the original strips being so much thicker, two layers of strips were used.

It doesn't sound a lot but there was a lot of work involved and I was busy from breakfast right through until 3pm when I knocked off for the day.

Other achievements for the day - I climbed up on the hood and painted the areas at the top of the bus with a spray can that needed extra paint. There are still areas devoid of grey paint but they're getting fewer and further apart. Silicone caulk was applied to the suspected leak area at the back of the hood.

As I have not driven the bus for 3 weeks, today I started it and went to a store some 7 miles away and picked up a box of donuts. The journey there and back was unremarkable aside from the truly lamentable driving of an individual driving a maroon SUV who decided to overtake when I was indicating to turn left.

Driving my bus since the metal garbagework of a previous owner had been removed is a load quieter. I could actually hear my GPS. I contrast that with what it was like when I picked the bus up from Augusta when my lady had to read the GPS on my phone and we could barely hear each other, shouting at the tops of our voices.

There are two cooling fans for the driver as there is no onboard air conditioning. One was siezed solid and today I detached it with the intention of installing a new fan (which was kindly left loose in the bus by a previous owner). I could not detect current going to the fan and then realised just as I was writing the blog that the red wire is the high-speed power and the orange wire is the low-speed power, not positive and negative because the body is negative. The fan still might not be right because it has a red and a black wire. Only time will tell and I have no time to rush out to work on the bus now.

After I returned to my parking place, I parked in a slightly different spot and was impressed by the hollows in the ground where the wheels had been. 3 weeks had caused the wheels to sink about an inch into the sandy soil.

If anybody remembers, last time I drove the bus, the speedo stopped working. It was working again today. It could be a water leak causing the problem. That was something else I worked on today with my silicone caulk.

The following are a selection of photos from today. Note the gap under my newly installed aluminum window. That's not my inaccurate cutting but rather, Carpenter's ripply metalwork. Carpenter has applied some lamentable workmanship and it's not really surprising that they went bust 6 years after making the bodywork for the bus.

Interestingly I found a plaque stating that the bus is a 59 seater. I thought it was a middle sized bus.

More on windows

Today I learned several really important lessons. First that when applying silicone caulk, disposable rubber gloves would be very useful. Secondly that securing a single bus window replacement in place requires an entire tube of silicone caulk and I'm not sure that I don't need more. Finally that freshly cut aluminum shelf draws blood from an unguarded finger quite effortlessly.

As astute readers may have assumed, today I finished the cutting on the sheet of aluminum for window number two but used it in window number one instead. I also trimmed about 1/8th of an inch off the other sheet of aluminum in order to make it fit the window aperture.

Having cut the aluminum, I took out a bus window - the one behind the driver's seat to be precise. That seemed complicated but was actually quite simple. It was a case of removing an interior bulkhead that actually turned out not to be a bulkhead but a cover over an electric cable. Then it was a case of removing the six screws that held the window in place and wiggling the window loose. Of course, I went the extra mile and loosened interior panels just in case. In order to loosen the panel I had to open a cable duct and inside the cable duct was more proof that the bus had just sat in a field - there was an insect nest made of concreted mud.

My intention had been to replace two windows and switch one over to the passenger side today. I ran out of caulk and daylight. Tomorrow the idea was to take the bus to the locksmith to get some decent lock solutions. That's on hold now though. I want to finish securing the windows first. Once the caulk has dried, I have some brackets glued in place that I want to rivet to the bulkheads just to make sure the window does not accidentally come out.

The next thing to do since I have tomorrow off is to head to Lowes to get some rubber gasket and some more silicone caulking. Tomorrow also I have to start the bus engine or it will end up being a month between starts. I can already see light rust forming on the brake disks. That's not good. I have to drive my bus soon. The odometer still does not function and the mechanic fellow that gave me his number is not responding to my messages. He's probably busy  but it's frustrating when I have but two days a week to work on my bus.

There was an urge to go to Lowes before dinner but my lady forbade me to do so. Apparently I spent longer in Lowes than I spend in the shower. I guess it could be said that I'm clean and well-equipped.