One month after getting the bus, this is where it’s at.

My brother came over to help me grind out the rivets holding up the roof.

It took a while.

Notice the blankets and cardboard around him to protect the windows.  The hot shards will burn the glass.  Some of these windows will go away, but I wanted to be able to save as much as possible in case I need to replace something.  It worked pretty well, though it destroyed these blankets.  We still burned the glass in a few places.

In the upper-right of this picture is a hole where the lights were attached.  I pulled them out, cut the wires, and labeled them with a location in case I want to put the system back in the new roof.  The lights only require one positive wire since they complete the circuit by grounding to the metal roof.  Therefore, if my future roof is not metal (which it won’t be) I’ll have to figure out some other way to complete the circuit.  I’ve considered doing some experiments with soldering the backs of the light fixtures to a wire that is attached to the bus ribs.  I might have to completely nix using the old wires, though.  We’ll see.

Lots of protective gear to prevent hair fires.

This is why I always wear my coveralls when working on the bus.  It doesn’t matter how small the job is, this project will destroy clothes. Better to rip a hole in my coveralls than my jeans.  This happened when I was trying to pull myself up into the back of the bus and got snagged on a floor nail.

I picked up my coveralls used from NAPA for like $35.  Whoever owned them before was shorter and fatter than me, but they do a pretty good job of protecting me.  Notice the high-water ankles.

The doo-rags were a must for preventing scalp burns and hair fires.

This job was tough on the grinder wheels, so we had to change them out pretty often.  Still, much faster and easier than prying, drilling, or chiseling, in my opinion.

First few pieces of ceiling.  At this time, scrap metal was at a super low price.  All of the seats fetched me about $20 in two car-loads.  I called a scrapper to take most of the ceiling away for free.  Not wasting time with that.

Had to do a dump run to get rid of all the cruddy fiberglass insulation.

The pile grows…

And grows…

Nearing the end.

The fiberglass was glued to the ceiling in only a few places.  The shop-vac took care of those spots.

Looks pretty clean.

My brother and I got it done in a day.  We also managed to get the wall panels off.  I don’t have any pictures of that, but it was essentially the same process.