Sealing the floor

[frank-id]

A large tube of about any caulking or silicone will stop any air or moisture. Sealing the floor from the outside has more value than anything leaking out. The floor will need some caulking probably several times. Been using my old Crown for about 7 years and have not yet sealed anything.
Removing any product from floor is not required. Some thick carpet padding and carpet does the best job. If the carpet gets dirty, change the carpet and maybe the pad. On a schoolie everything can be changed. Try to avoid heavy products as it costs money to move down the hiway. Frank

[Diesel Dan]

I (and most other people as well) used silicone caulk from the inside. But in all the cases I can think of they had removed all the rubber and plywood and were thus working on the metal floor directly. I'm sure the caulk would do fine with the wood and rubber in place too. For those holes that are accessible from the outside, I recommend using a small blob of roofing tar on the outside of each hole.

[lornaschinske]

Our bus has rubber floor mat on top of sheet steel. No plywood.

[Diesel Dan]

Another benefit of pulling up the rubber is it comes in handy later to be used as gasket material, electrical insulator, cabinet liner for tool/fluids storage, or who knows what other purposes. I've saved as much of mine as I could, and have already re-used it for a few things. The rubber will be more stiff and prone to cracking if you pull it out when cold, but that shouldn't make the job that much more difficult - you may just end up with slightly less re-usable material. You could always run a heater in the bus for several hours before pulling it up...

[lornaschinske]

We tried pulling ours up back during the summer. It was stuck too well to the floor, even where the seats were bolted thru the floor. We're are leaving ours and running a sheet of plywood on top with foam sheathing under the floor from below.

[Diesel Dan]

I should mention that my rubber was glued to the plywood that was nailed to the metal floor. So I pryed up the plywood with the rubber attached all in one piece and then tried to scrape any useable rubber off the plywood after the fact. I only removed the rubber that came off easily and cleanly. Some of it was glued on pretty well, and it wasn't worth the effort for me to salvage it, especially since the plywood splinters would remain attached and it would be fairly useless for re-use. So I suppose you could have the same experience as Lorna where the rubber is just glued down so well that it would be really time-consuming to get it off. And of course once you start tearing at it, if you can't finish the job, you'll wish you never started. I suppose you'd just have to carefully "poke at it" a bit first and get a feeling for how difficult it will be to pull up...

[dirtygoat]

The rubber came up really easy on mine, but it was glued to plywood... The plywood, on the other hand, sucked... It was screwed down and the heads were rusted... Pretty much had to pry it up and take a grinder to all the screws afterward...