Looking for advice on how to deal with the rust

[Flynt]

I recently got my bus back from the mechanic and everything is working great. My next goal is to get the floors fixed up. The rust doesn't seem to be too bad except for around the stairs and wheel wells. The whole bottom stair has rusted out and the bar that holds the doors in has fallen off. Looks like it was due to a bad welding job in the past. I have no experience with welding or metalwork and was looking at welders near me on craigslist. Does anyone else have experience with this? I don't really see any way I can fix that bottom stair by myself. As for the wheel wells I was thinking about repairing them myself by just putting some 20ga steel over the holes that I have leftover from covering windows. Though the holes do seem to be pretty big and I'm not sure if this is the best solution. I can stand on the wheel wells without them moving at all and I don't plan on putting anything super heavy over them. Everything underneath also doesn't appear to be rusting too badly. I'll include pictures of everything below. My plan for the rest of the floor is to use Ospho and paint with Rustoleum. Though I did just find the ultra rust converter on Amazon. It seems to be easier to spread and might be more effective. What would be best to treat the floors with?

[peteg59]

Anything can be fixed. The main obstacle for some is cost.
It's worth whatever you feel comfortable investing.

Another thing to consider is the amount of time you can realistically spend working on it.

If you can't do the work and have to pay a stranger to do a roadworthy and quality patching of that floor, your project costs have just skyrocketed exponentially.

Hopefully you have the shop space to do the work in for however long it takes to fix or replace. Emphasis on replace, (if you plan on keeping it for many years to come).

Good luck and post pics of your progress, if you go ahead on this bus...

[musigenesis]

I had similar damage to yours around the wheel wells. Check out my build thread from the link at the bottom of this post, but here's a synopsis of the repair I did: https://imgur.com/a/Vp4Xpv6. On your bus, the section between the two wheel wells looks fine so probably your repair will not need to be as drastic as mine was. Just get in there with an angle grinder and cut through the rusty stuff until you get to relatively healthy steel, square everything up and weld in sheet metal and angle steel to repair/replicate the original structure. Don't worry about the bus collapsing around you as you cut - as you can see, a bus holds itself up around that area.

My step well is nearly new, having been replaced by the previous owner due to rust, so I can't help you there. But it does look fairly easy to cut out the rusted parts of the step and weld patches over it. Buses often use a piece of rub rail on the underside of a step to stiffen it, but a piece of angle steel would serve the same purpose. Or, you could buy a whole replacement step unit for, uhhhhhhh, a mere $770. Never mind.

[Flynt]

Originally Posted by musigenesis

I had similar damage to yours around the wheel wells. Check out my build thread from the link at the bottom of this post, but here's a synopsis of the repair I did: https://imgur.com/a/Vp4Xpv6. On your bus, the section between the two wheel wells looks fine so probably your repair will not need to be as drastic as mine was. Just get in there with an angle grinder and cut through the rusty stuff until you get to relatively healthy steel, square everything up and weld in sheet metal and angle steel to repair/replicate the original structure. Don't worry about the bus collapsing around you as you cut - as you can see, a bus holds itself up around that area.

My step well is nearly new, having been replaced by the previous owner due to rust, so I can't help you there. But it does look fairly easy to cut out the rusted parts of the step and weld patches over it. Buses often use a piece of rub rail on the underside of a step to stiffen it, but a piece of angle steel would serve the same purpose. Or, you could buy a whole replacement step unit for, uhhhhhhh, a mere $770. Never mind.

Ah yes, I remember seeing some of your posts about the rust on your bus. Sadly I don't know anything at all about metalwork and welding. Just found someone that did a similar project on a bus that might be able to help me out. We will see how much that ends up costing...

[musigenesis]

Originally Posted by Flynt

Ah yes, I remember seeing some of your posts about the rust on your bus. Sadly I don't know anything at all about metalwork and welding. Just found someone that did a similar project on a bus that might be able to help me out. We will see how much that ends up costing...

A welding machine and some scrap steel will cost a lot less than hiring somebody. I didn't know anything about metal work or welding before I bought my bus, either.

[karrlot]

I had very similar damage. I used a needle scaler on the floor getting rid of all of the rust that I could. I used an angle grinder to cut out the rust holes. I used Ospho on the floor and chair rail. I painted it with Rustoleum. I got some scrap pieces of metal from the scrap bin at a metal supply place. I used the angle grinder and cut them to cover the holes then painted them with rustoleum. I used 3M 560 polyurethane adhesive/sealant and glued them in. I then used the same 3M 560 to glue pennies over all of the holes.
It worked very well and was very low cost.

I've got about 5 posts on my blog with this process https://karrfamilykampingbus.blogspo...-floor-in.html.