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