Kraig got the floor out after like a week of removing screws only to find more screws.

I meant to finish this post three days ago….

But I’ve been busy doing a little research and working on the bus. It’s a little weird not to be able to drive it anymore if I need to do something.

You can’t really see it in the above photo, but there’s about an inch Gap between the body of the bus, and the cowling that holds the engine portion of the bus to the cabin compartment of the bus. This bus used to be an Idaho fire crew bus, originally, and you can see that it’s been painted red over top of the orange in some places that most school buses come automatically. Over that it was painted beige at some point and I don’t know by whom. But if you look at the red area you can see a huge engine compartment that is only sealed up by one small piece of metal. And all that open space lets all that heat in. It looks like there was some form of weather stripping at some point to mitigate the heat transfer from the engine compartment into the passenger area, but it sure wasn’t working the last year, so I’m going to have to go to Napa and try to figure out something to replace it to try and insulate the heat from coming in.

This here is my best friend right now:

I got about 10 to 15% of the floor done today and then I realized that I really need to get that plywood out from underneath the driver’s platform because the floor is pretty bad there. Kraig helped me get the last two pieces, and all that’s left now is that little tiny strip up by the pedals that’s about 8 in by 20 in. I have to cut that away tomorrow with my oscillating tool and then I can get through and start grinding all the rust up there too.

Now that I’ve started grinding all the rust away, I’m realizing it’s not as bad as I thought it might be. I can also work for only about 10 minutes at a time before the grinder overheats. That means I can make it through about one and a half 6 amp hour batteries and then I have to take a break for the grinder to cool off and to charge batteries. 

Luckily I have that fancy 8 amp DeWalt battery charger that can do four batteries rapidly all at the same time and I’m so psyched that I bought that because I would be waiting days and days to get this job done if I wasn’t able to constantly cycle batteries.

I’ll get some more photos tomorrow of the driver cockpit area once I get that stinky piece of moldy plywood out of there in the front and the grinding done. 

But now it’s time for fresca and putting my feet up and taking a break.