Kyle arrived from Juneau a few days ago, and we have been working on the interior bus demolition.
Before he got here, Mel and I removed all the unseized screws from the interior sheet metal ceiling in the front half of the bus.
My nephew, Anthony, came down to Red Lodge and removed the entire AC system. We also moved almost everything we traveled with into Keri’s warehouse or living space so we could break out the interior panels to access the roof for the solar install.
Kyle brought the new odometer module from the Anchorage Freightliner dealer, and I installed it today. We drove about 14 miles and adjusted the settings until both the odometer and speedometer functioned accurately.
I went through my Google timeline since a April 28th to calculate the miles for the trip, and how many miles the bus has put on since the ECM data was pulled.
From our house in Juneau until we had the appointment at Floyd’s Truck center in Belgrade, MT, we went 1,662.9 miles.
After that appointment, I drove about 3,384.9 miles to Red Lodge, then on the rest of the way to New York state. We left New York and returned west and went back to Montana, camping in Oregon, to the Bus Fair, and back to Red Lodge.
Total miles for this trip so far have been 8002.4!
It would have been far less had we not traveled all the way to NY state- that added about 5000 of the total miles this summer.
We will likely put about 2000 more miles on the bus before we get home.
Total base mileage for the bus so far is 141,607.1— that includes the ECM reading until today— when I installed the new Odometer. It took us 14 miles to properly calibrate it, and so now we will add 141610.1 miles to the current reading to have the actual mileage for the bus. (It registered 11 miles of the 14 we knew we traveled during the calibration.)
WOO!
Most of the paint has arrived for the roof prep.
On the way back from Oregon, we stopped at Green Tech power in Bozeman and bought some Iron Ridge solar racking rails and hardware. I also ordered adjustable angled attachment feet from Skoolie.com which will compensate for the curved shape of the roof.
It’s raining today, and going to rain tomorrow, so we plan on finishing the roof scuffing and prep if we can between showers. Hopefully by the weekend we will be able to paint the entire roof and get the solar panels mounted on the front half of the roof.
I’m excited to keep working on the build, although we won’t be able to accomplish everything I had wanted for the summer with our change of plans.