Getting Steel Wall Panels Out Without Damaging Chair Rails

[Nick5272]

Hello everyone! This is my first post on this site. Surely won’t be the last. The bus is a 1991 full size flat nose blue bird 3800 international

I’m in the demo phase of my skoolie still. We got the floor painted and good to go for insulation and I just finished stripping the ceiling. Now I’m onto the walls. My walls don’t have that normal flexible silver material I’ve seen in other buses. Mine is hard cream white colored steel thats riveted all the way down. .

How should I go about demoing these for future spray foam? I’ve heard the chair rails are structural so I don’t want to mess with that. How do you get the insulation out though?

Thanks in advance!

[doncobb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NEs9i8Bmoo

We used this method and there was no damage to our chair rail. Nor was there a lot of damage to the panels that were removed.

We also have a Bluebird so I would suspect you could use this method. The rivets will leave holes in the chair rail but that is unavoidable.

[Dbacks2k4]

Originally Posted by Nick5272

Hello everyone! This is my first post on this site. Surely won’t be the last. The bus is a 1991 full size flat nose blue bird 3800 international

I’m in the demo phase of my skoolie still. We got the floor painted and good to go for insulation and I just finished stripping the ceiling. Now I’m onto the walls. My walls don’t have that normal flexible silver material I’ve seen in other buses. Mine is hard cream white colored steel thats riveted all the way down. .

How should I go about demoing these for future spray foam? I’ve heard the chair rails are structural so I don’t want to mess with that. How do you get the insulation out though?

Thanks in advance!

Looks fairly standard and maybe has just been painted. Air hammer in the center pin of the rivet, then use an air chisel with a sharpened tip to sheer the rivet off. You'll probably need to remove the windows to get the top off where it folds under the window. I've seen other builds take sheet metal scissors (harbor freight has some cheap electric ones) and just cut the metal off below the windows instead of taking them out as a shortcut.