Prepping and Priming

Happy are those who dream dreams and are willing to pay the price to make them come true. ~ Anonymous

The past fortnight has been two weeks of muscle-sapping effort in all of my available free time. The old paint has been flatted down with 150 grit sandpaper, all over. All of the loose rust has been wire-brushed and treated with rust converting goop. As always you can enlarge the pics by clicking on them. Or not, whatever works for you ;)

I spent another four hours washing, scrubbing and rinsing the entire bus to get it ready for the next step.

Masking and taping off the windows and door handles took another two evenings of patient but frustrating work. As I've discovered with most of the tasks in this project, it's not as easy as it looks.

Eventually, after months of anticipation, we can start throwing some primer at the project. After a quick wipe-down with with a rag dipped in thinners we could start at the front, windscreen surround and the foremost part of the roof. We started off using a smaller spray-gun for the detail work around the 'screen area and then moved to a bigger one for the more open, flatter areas.

We made it as far as the driver's door before the exhaustion started to wear us out. It was after 11pm and time to give it a rest. Over all it looks pretty good. The coverage is fairly neat but it's tricky to get a nice, clean layer of paint laid down and it's not perfect. The nice new layer of clean paint also seems to really highlight every little blemish and imperfection in the bodywork. On the plus side the paint seems to be going on well and the careful preparation seems to have been worthwhile.

Next session we'll continue with the priming, lot's of hard work left to do still but excitement levels are high!

Thanks for the visit, come again soon!
CooP

Noise and Dust

All I want is to stand in a field and to smell green, to taste air, to feel the earth want me, without all this concrete hating me.
Phillip Pulfrey

The only progress that I seem to be making lately is in the joint irritations of excessive noise and too much dust. I have been generating loads and loads of both. Thankfully the neighbours of my neighbour seem to be a pretty tolerant bunch. I wish that my own constitution could stand it better though, I coughed less than this back in my chain smoking days. And the ringing in my ears - don't ask 'cos I can't hear you properly.

I have started filling the horrible dented frontal area above the windscreen. I had planned to complete the remainder of the filling only after giving the whole bus a coat of primer, but this section I'd like to finish off as I want to get the windscreen back in as soon as poss. It has been flatted down in an approximate sort of way and won't be perfect before the primer coat, but it's a start anyway. I can go over the project at leisure after the primer coat has been chucked on.

The whole of the old girl's paintwork has been completely sandpapered with 150 and 180 grit paper. It's been an exhausting two weeks but the end is in sight at last. I have flatted down most of the existing paint and treated much of the rusted area with a magical rust-conversion muti to prepare it for the primer coat. 

I have only a couple of weeks remaining before the project must vacate the current premises and be moved to the small car-port outside my little rented room. As long as I have a fairly tidy, even coat of primer thrown on then I am hoping for my landlady to be tolerant of the presence of the big bus. After that then I can focus on the remainder of the bodywork and then the finishing coats of paint.

So...progress is being made, fairly surely although seemingly rather slowly. The preparation of the old paint has taken longer that I had expected and been physically far more effort that I imagined. But it's almost ready for a protective primer coat in the next week or two.


Thanks for popping over, come back soon! We'll be throwing some paint at it soon.
CooP