Days 23 and 24 - sheet metal and insulation

This weekend was my last big push before the bus goes up to oregon for a few weeks. I needed to get all the sheet metal closed up, the insulation in and the seat installed so it would be able to make the trip.

Saturday I worked on the sheet metal- found around with more bolts and rivets getting little bits I missed and closing seams I'd never dealt with. Everything came out pretty well except for these two weird corners at the front where stuff didn't meet up well. I made two custom corner covers to close up the bulk of it. There is still a bit of hole though that I'm just going to put a little temporary patch on for now. At the end of the day I did the first road test and drove the bus a few miles to Home Depot to get the insulation. I also stopped to fill up with diesal and discovered that my fuel wasn't siphoned after all. I think it was just the battery being dead that was stopping the bus from running before. (I bought a liking fuel cap anyways.) 

Sunday I had a bit of a delay because there were events going on at my work and I couldn't bring the bus into the loading dock to work on. I did some prep work while I waited and was later able to bring the bus in. I set up a table for cutting my foam outside the bus and cut out a bunch of sections of the insulation. The sides are now all insulated but I still need to go round and gaff tape the pieces in. Eventually the insulation will be covered with plywood but for now I'm just going to tape it in. 

I'm being lazy with pictures, but I wanteto get  the post out there. Next post will have lots of insulation pics! 

days 19-22 ish? - seat!

Sorry for the lack of bus posts. I've been in a grumpy mood in regards to the bus because lots of things weren't going smoothly and I felt like I wasn't getting anything done when I worked on it. I probably had a few days of puttering with the sheet metal, trying to plug holes in the past two weeks. We will call those 19 and 20, though I'm sure there was more. 

Beyond puttering with the sheet metal I did accomplish something excellent which was building the passenger seat! I had been planning to buy a bucket seat for the passenger but I was getting frustrated by Craigslist, because I'd have to go get it, the seats available weren't that cute and they were more expensive than I wanted ($100ish). I also was planni to buy a new seat belt because most used seats don't come with full seatbelt setup plus it seemed safest to buy a new one. The seatbelt was $60. I got an orange one!

Back to the seat, I did a bit of internet (skoolie forums mostly) on rv seats and realized a lot of rv people add seatbelts to their existing bench seating for extra safety. Most times legally only the driver and passenger have to have a belt but some folks prefer to add a belt for other people in the rv. This got me thinking why not just add a belt to a chair? I also was assembling an ikea chair during work and  realized how it's simple, blocky design would be great for the bus! The chair was like $300 on ikea and a bit bigger than I wanted, but it was so simply built I figured I should just make one custom to my needs. Those needs included a storage box in the seat, a small profile and the ability to have it face forward for driving and backwards for tabling. 

Here is my design. It breaks into three parts- storage box, seat and back. 

I built the wood structure in one day with scrap wood from work. I was able to upholster it in two days with a bit of time after work, during breaks and a few hours my boss was nice enough to let me work on it during work. For this project I bought the foam new but everything else (including the awesome orange velvet) was stuff from work I was able to salvage or given. A Craigslist seat probably would have been $100 and still needed to be re upholstered, so I think this was a grand success.