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Old 01-02-2007, 09:02 AM   #101
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Try an inexpensive carbide fine tooth "plywood" blade to cut sheet aluminum, install it backwards in the saw and lubricate it with a smear of crisco on both sides, don your PPG, goggles, gloves, earplugs and earmuffs then commence to cut, you'll find it faster with no offensive odor from the abrasive wheels and also a lot fewer burrs to remove from the cut edge.

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Old 01-02-2007, 10:51 PM   #102
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Have not priced Filon, but found a similar material at Home Depot:
FRP (fiberglass reinforced plastic), .090" thick, 4' x 8' sheets. Textured on one
side, smooth on the other. $30. Apparently used for shower stalls and such.
Maybe I'll try them on one side of the bus? (Nobody can see both sides at the
same time!)
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Old 01-03-2007, 11:43 AM   #103
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Well, I cannot elude Gainful Employment any longer, and there is weather on the horizon,
so I have tucked Millicent into her Sleep-O-Bag for the time being.



Zzzzzzzzzzz....
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Old 01-03-2007, 11:48 AM   #104
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Wow, where did you get that bag?
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Old 01-03-2007, 02:00 PM   #105
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Found it on eBay. It is an Adco RV cover. It is perforated so it can "breathe",
but it should keep most of the rain out. And it cleans up the junk yard look.
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Old 01-03-2007, 06:56 PM   #106
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Elliot Naess
Well, I cannot elude Gainful Employment any longer, and there is weather on the horizon,
so I have tucked Millicent into her Sleep-O-Bag for the time being.

Zzzzzzzzzzz....
Awww...that's a sad sight.
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Old 01-03-2007, 07:57 PM   #107
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But when I go inside it with the cover on, I get a good sense of how the finished bus
will feel! Cozy!

All right, I'm supposed to be writing (on deadline!), but I'm easily distracted.
Warning. Boring anecdote approaching. Warning.....
That cover is a Tea Cozy. Millicent is known around here -- when we take
time to spell it all out -- as the Kinetic Sculpture Racing Mobile Kommand Center
and Tea Parlour. (Was Tasting Room, but we have teetotalers among us,
which I certainly respect.)
Now, a tea cozy isn't so sad, eh?
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Old 01-03-2007, 08:00 PM   #108
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Actually I'm looking for one of those covers too. As soon as I start pulling out all the windows I'm not going to want to leave the whole inside of the bus exposed. And when the roof goes up (and it will!) I'll need to cover the bus while the siding is put on and the front cap fabricated.
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Old 01-03-2007, 08:17 PM   #109
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Ya know...you said you found that fiberglass shower stall stuff at home depot. I went to both home depots within an hour of me (but in opposite directions of each other) and to Menards...everyone had heard of the stuff, nobody carried it. That's what prevented my shower from getting finished last year! I was half debating getting some resin and cloth and doing it myself, but me using fiberglass usually ends in tears. Inexplicably I always get a huge gob of resin in my hair which simulates fiberglass cloth rather well leaving me with a rockhard weather and chemical proof blob on my head!

I'm a little jealous of that cover. If you don't mind my asking, what did you pay for it roughly and what are the dimensions? My bus currently sits in it's own little parking spot off the side of the driveway in the woods. The only protection it has is from the trees (which might be more threat than protection in an ice storm). It also has two big pieces of rigid foam over the windshield to protect from rocks thrown by the snowblower when we finally have to take the snowblower out to widen the driveway. I WILL be the first person to invent a working benching wing for an ATV.....

As for the galvanic corrosion....my personal opinion is that you should be ok unless you throw some acid in there and try and make a battery. It would really depend on the grade of the aluminum that you're using which is unfortunate because there are so darn many different alloys of it. I guess it doesn't really matter....how hard is it to shoot a "just in case" coat of paint?

If you wanted to do a comparison, there is a website that I have used COUNTLESS times for various stages in my engineering curriculum that just happens to have a page devoted entirely to galvanic corrosion. It might be worthwhile bookmarking their homepage based on some of the contraptions you've constructed.

http://www.engineersedge.com/galvanic_capatability.htm
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Old 01-03-2007, 08:43 PM   #110
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You should have no trouble finding RV covers at RV stores and on eBay.
This one had a price tag on the box that said $289. I got it for $157
delivered to my door. Never unpacked. It fits a Class A RV from 37' to 40'.
Millicent is 40', and there is plenty of room for mirrors and such. It is perforated,
but that's probably a good thing. It should keep out 95% of the rain.
I have a catalog that lists a 38'-40' Duraguard for 199,95.

Couldn't find those FRP sheets at HD eh.... They have a pallet of them here.
And they've had them for years -- I used one to form a fiberglass mold many years ago.
Fiberglass requires careful method and lots of gloves. I've had more luck working the
stuff with my (gloved!) hands than with brushes and rollers.
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Old 01-04-2007, 02:54 AM   #111
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I loved working with fibreglass...as for the hair, the only thing we used to clean up was acatone (sp?) which can be found near the paint area of wal-mart (at least here)..course you would need some way of standing on your head as you def wouldn't want it in your eyes....oh, and when you all play with any kind of fibreglass..rinse yourself with COLD water first...trust me you have a lot less itchyness that way.
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Old 01-04-2007, 02:55 PM   #112
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My problem was that I didn't discover the glob right away. By the time I did, it had hardened and the only thing that was going to clean it up was a pair of scissors.
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Old 01-04-2007, 03:54 PM   #113
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Nice job on the roof raise, I really like the jack system you came up with, slick!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Elliot Naess
You should have no trouble finding RV covers at RV stores and on eBay.
This one had a price tag on the box that said $289. I got it for $157
delivered to my door. Never unpacked. It fits a Class A RV from 37' to 40'.
Millicent is 40', and there is plenty of room for mirrors and such. It is perforated,
but that's probably a good thing. It should keep out 95% of the rain.
I have a catalog that lists a 38'-40' Duraguard for 199,95.


I got mine for $289 from Northern Tool.

http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/ ... 805_245805

Jake.
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Old 01-04-2007, 08:21 PM   #114
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Thanks, Jake! It wasn't difficult -- just a matter of deciding that the roof was NOT going
anywhere but straight up, and assembling what it took to do that. A mindset.

Great web site, Jake!
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Old 01-06-2007, 10:34 AM   #115
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Automatic updates are ready to install


S-l-o-w-l-y, ever so slowly, the embarrassment is fading, and I am ready to
confess a flaw in the Roof Lift Plan. It didn’t make any significant difference,
but it was an embarrassing oversight.

Les and I both figured this out at about the same time -- great minds think alike.
Les figured it out while using his brain, and I figured it out when I fell off the
ladder and smacked mine adequately.

When I started installing the skin, I quickly found that I needed to remove the
outside plates on the window pillars, leaving only the hat section. That I could
easily have seen before I started. Well, without those plates, I didn’t need to
pump the roof up those extra seven inches to slip the inserts into place -- I could
have set the inserts into place from the side!
I could then have shimmed the inserts to be flush with the outside surface of the
hat sections, and I would have had a smooth surface top to bottom for the skin.
So that’s what you will do when you lift yours. No extra charge. Microshaft calls it
an “automatic update”.

The good news is -- without those plates, I can weld the inserts to the hat sections
vertically also.

Gotta go do other stuff -- back in a week or two.

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Old 01-06-2007, 08:30 PM   #116
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Re: Automatic updates are ready to install

Quote:
Originally Posted by Elliot Naess
Les and I both figured this out at about the same time -- great minds think alike.
Les figured it out while using his brain, and I figured it out when I fell off the
ladder and smacked mine adequately.
I don't know about stretching far enough to call it "thinking"! :P

I will, however, admit to letting you do yours first!
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Old 01-16-2007, 06:02 PM   #117
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Progress report

Weekly Progress Report

Nothing to report; I've been out of town.

Like any doting parent who's been away, I brought my Millicent a present from
far-away lands. Hopefully, these galoshes will protect her rather expensive
sneakers from the ravages of Old Sol.


I find that the Tea Cozy does not quite keep rain out, but it also allows the water
that gets in to dry away.
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Old 01-24-2007, 01:44 PM   #118
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Interior brainstorming

Alas, the excitement of The Roof Lift is over.

All the outside skin still needs installing, but first I need to know where the
windows will be, so I can cut and weld and otherwise prepare the window
openings. And to place the window openings, I need to know where the
furniture will be. So I’m “rearranging the furniture”.

Everything here is just propped up on milk crates and otherwise jerry-rigged into
position so I can see how everything fits. And I’m finding that some things don’t
-- at least not the way I originally planned. No problem.



I dragged my Eldorado truck driver’s seat (brown) out of the shed and may use
that. We have four of these nice Hyundai Santa Fe car seats (gray) -- that
were free -- but I don’t know if they will all be used.
There is a swiveling seat base on its way here on a UPS truck -- the idea is to
have a Hyundai seat directly behind the dog house (engine cover) swivel so
it can be used both as a co-pilot seat and a dining seat. (The seat sitting on
a steel wire milk crate in the pictures.) But the swivel may have to go behind
the right wheel well instead.



Just kind’a brainstorming in full scale.



The bath room components look like they fit nicely, and there is room below the
toilet for the sewer tank.



Looks like one pair of bunk beds, with the upper folding down to serve as the
back of a couch (on left, no upper yet). Thanks to the high ceiling, there is
room for three bunks up above the other furniture -- these will fold up to
the ceiling so people don’t bump their heads into them during the day.

Boring, but necessary.

The Tea Cozy -- the big “sleeping bag” RV cover -- has already suffered several
cuts from flapping in the wind, mostly at the bottom. Lots of sharp edges on
these buses. And those triangular marker lights on the roof have to go. But
the Tea Cozy does wonders for neighborhood good will, and Adco makes
adhesive patch material for it.
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Old 01-25-2007, 08:40 AM   #119
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Looking good Elliot! Funny how much different our buses look when we start putting things inside (and how they shrink!)
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Old 01-25-2007, 09:25 AM   #120
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Yes, good lesson here for all you starry-eyed beginning bus-converters out there.
That bus seems like an airplane hangar -- and the runway -- once you get the seats out,
but when you start putting stuff back in, it gets smaller again real fast.
So don't be shy; get a BIG bus. And an acre in the country to keep it on.

I find that I cannot make much use of drawings, or even measurements. My mind
needs to see things in full scale, with the real components in place. The proposed
swivel seat in the middle is already gone. It was in the way too much and forced people
to walk to the right-hand side of the bus -- where they would be uncomfortably
close to the overhead bunk at forehead-level.
I put a bus bench there instead of those two car seats -- quite a bit narrower.
When you get ready to go thru this process in your bus, be sure you have lots of
cardboard boxes, two-by-fours etc to prop things up on. I just used a rope to hold
a proposed upper bunk in place at different heights.
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