Bus Blog 5: Wipe and Seal

Pressure washers are squirt guns on a mix of steroids and brown-brown.  It was summer and hot and the back-spray from the water cannon I held in my hands was welcome.  The machine uprooted remnants of rust and adhesive from the floor, destroying years of dust, dirt and homogeneous sticky goop that had accumulated, concrete like, in various parts of the interior.
My wife, Kirstin, took a turn and blew the stairs clean with a few sprays of the gun, then shrugged her shoulders, unimpressed.
I took it back from her gladly, using the jet of water to scrub the floor, the lower walls, under the dash, the heaters, the engine, the tires, the windows, I eradicated dirt in every crevasse, crack and hole I could reach.   This went on for a while.  It was only when I climbed back into the bus and began tearing the numbered stickers off the tops of the walls with the jet of water while giggling, that I got a look.  "Are you done yet?"
Water dripped from every surface, it pooled on the floor, ran down my legs, "Gotta use it while you got it."
She maintained her gaze.
"Well, I guess, yes I'm done."

Being the height of a dry summer, water began to evaporate immediately.  With a few whips of a mop and blasts from an air compressor the accumulated puddles disappeared and we broke to let the bus air out.  Later, I patrolled the interior wire brushing, then applying rust converter to anything that had even a reminiscence of an orangish hue, until dark.

The next step, was to roll the steel floor with tar.  Tar is strong, water-proof, flexible, acts as an adhesive, is easy to apply and doesn't cost much.  Several coats of it have the benefit of helping to deaden sounds that would normally reverberate across the bus.  And, what the hell?  If the bus was to be our travelling house, why not invest the extra $40 for a bucket of tar and roller to keep rust away for good?

Kirstin was the obvious choice for applicator.  She is not an artist by any means, she draws things that look like clouds crossed with puddles of vomit and insists on calling them "Dragons", but she can paint like a pro.  While I mainly spill paint at things, my wife can do an entire apartment in one evening, barely mask anything and not spill a drop.  It takes me hours and a box of rags to clean-up after myself; she's done in minutes.  Did I really want to tangle with one of the stickiest substances on earth, or leave it to the professional?
I chose the latter, clad in a tank-top, baggy pants (with two specks of paint on them) and skate shoes, she got to work.  The paint roller and extension whipped up and down the length of the bus depositing a layer of thick, viscous tar with each pass.  There's no messing around with the black goop, it sticks and won't let go easy.  It sucked on to the bare metal floor, for good, we hoped.
If you don't allow water or air to react with a ferrous metal surface, it won't rust.  That's the theory behind tin and galvanized steel, behind nickel and rhodium plating, behind paint and well, tar.  If you don't let the metal breathe, it will stay metal.  If you let it breathe, it will crumble.  We aimed to never let this floor breathe and Kirstin made sure to roll the tar on thick.

While there are a great many benefits to using tar, it stinks, is difficult to wash off, isn't entirely eco-friendly and takes forever to dry.  Our quest to seal the floor properly before construction, cost us a week and a half of drying time, but saved us money compared to other sealing and waterproofing methods.  If you're converting a school bus, check out all the options before deciding.  This blog isn't a 'how-to', it's a 'how-we-did', learn from our successes and failures and things we're too stubborn to admit were bad ideas, then do your own thinking.

Bus Blog 4: Demolition 2

I suppose it's time to mention that I have a bit of an inquisitive nature.  Well, more than a bit really, because while a couple hours searching the web to find info on a topic of interest will satisfy the curiosity of some, I belong to the class of people who absolutely must experience the query in the most tactile sense.  I can't only read about blacksmithing, I have to re-purpose a forge out of an empty propane tank, make my own burner from plumbing parts laying around the shop, buy an anvil, make a series of shop tools, learn to temper, case harden, oxidize, forge, then make any and everything from all the steel I've been accumulating, just in case I decided to take-up blacksmithing.
 While a nature like this is a large part of the reason that I never really seem to take a day off, it certainly comes in handy when I need to rip-up the plywood sub-floor of the bus and need the right tool to do it.  After an hour of work, I fashioned myself a serviceable wrecking bar and headed to the bus to resume demolition.

A potential pitfall of having and 'inquisitive' nature is that your shop tends to look like both a tool catalog and pawnshop exploded and were then organized by a group of dust-covered kindergartners chugging energy drinks.

I had let the bus sit for 2 days with all of the windows down and front door open so the hot summer air could suck the moisture from the sub-floor.  After approaching with a bit of hesitation, I was relieved to find the floors dry and air inside actually breathable.
Since we lacked the space to keep all the ripped-up seats and flooring outside of the bus, we decided it best to pile everything on one side, tear-out the sub and move everything over, then do the other side.  By crisscrossing the exposed floor with cuts from my circular saw, we were able to pull the sub-floor up in smaller, easier to handle pieces.  My homemade wrecking bar made dust of the nails holding down the ply, and as I lifted the sub, I got my first look at the steel panels that everything inside the bus rested upon.
I had been a bit worried about this: the amount of water in the plywood meant that the steel base had been soaking, for who knows how long.  I really didn't want to have to spend a bunch of time cutting out bad panels, welding in new ones, then tarring and spray-foaming the new floor to match the rest of the protected bus bottom.  But, after a few worry-some spots, it turned out that the floor was in great shape.  A little wire brushing, rust converter and a good seal and she'd be ready.

I drove the wrecking bar under the ply and lifted, drove and lifted, the rhythm and tangible progress was enough to make the work quick.  The detritus was shifted to the other side of the bus and it was bare to the steel in no time.  After a few calls to local metal recyclers, the seats were stripped-down to the steel and tin then the various waste was separated into piles.  I re-secured the driver's seat and got ready for the ride to the dump.

Driving a re-purposed school bus takes a bit of getting used to.  It's not as much the driving, as the looks you can get from people, the pointing, the, "Dude's nuts," comments.  That awkward teenager that lives inside of each one of us hoping not to be singled-out or called attention to ducks and hides, infusing us with a desire to conform, why the hell are we doing this anyway?  This will never work.*  So, when I pulled up to the front gate and the guy in the window gave me a look as if his forehead had just been rubbed by a lemon, I did what any awkward teenager who drinks way too much coffee does and began blurting out everything, as incoherently as possible.
"Uh, dumping, uh stuff, floor, uh, turning this into a, seat cushions, plywood, RV, linoleum...  It's insured, no chemicals or anything, and registered, smelled like mildew, mechanic says it'll..."
His forehead relaxed and he smiled, "Oh, I thought you were here for a tour.  I would have let you in free."
"What?"
"You're driving a school bus."
"Oh.  Ohhhhhh!"  I then proceeded to laugh harder than was appropriate.  He gave me a number, another smaller, look of confusion and I headed into the fury of seagulls and mountains of trash.

There wasn't much to it really, I had already stopped at the metal recyclers and ditched all the tin and steel from the seats earning me $30, twenty minutes of tossing old seat cushions and rotten flooring out the back door and ten minutes of serious sweeping later, the bill at the dump amounted to $20, leaving me $10 for lunch.

I headed back, parked the bus and got ready to do a serious clean-out.

If you're curious about blacksmithing, I recommend this book: The Complete Modern Blacksmith it's a fantastic resource from someone who has made it all.  It teaches not only techniques and tools, but ways to improvise if you lack the basics.

*Everyone is different, but sooner or later that nervous teenager of the psyche evolves at first into a cautious adult, then blooms into a fat nudist who has "Screw 'em if they can't take a joke" tattooed across his/her back-side.  I've found that taking on ridiculous projects and challenging the norm are the quickest ways toward this evolution.  Well, quickest healthy way.