So I’ve been back in Ottawa just over two weeks now. I do miss Vancouver but I’ve been able to get a lot done on the bus 🙂 First thing I did was see if she’d start up again. It ran so well on our journey home I was curious to how it held up to the cold. You can see the video here :

After that it was back to the deconstruction. With all the seats removed the next step was to take down the luggage racks. These guys were massive. Two 10 foot pieces of 100% aluminium on each side. With two people it was still a challenge to get them down without hurting the bus or ourselves. We also had to cut them in half to get them outside but it was a fairly quick process.

With the luggage racks out it was finally starting to feel more like a usable space: you can walk from side to side without bending over or smashing your head. The next step was tackling the washroom. This beast was built out  of a single, welded piece of stainless steel surrounded by 1/2 inch plywood walls sandwiched between two pieces of sheet aluminium. After ripping it all out we had to open up one of the windows just to get it outside. There is still a whole in the back and a sewage tank underneath that I haven’t tried to take out yet but that’s for another day as it seems to be built deeply into the engine compartment…

With that stuff out of the way we moved on to the plywood floor, wall panels and some other odds and ends. The wall panels that had the carpeting were more aluminium sheets held about 1/3 of an inch from the actual side of the coach. This is where heading and air conditioning came up from below the floor. They were held on by massive screws, a lot of which ended up needing to be ground off. The floor was an even longer process, however. Long stretches of plywood ran down with what seemed like 100 screws in each one. Every screw was covered and filled with some kind of leveling past or glue compound which needed to be cleaned out before trying to unscrew it. Some of the screws came out easy but near the edges you could see where water seeped under the floor and rusted the screws/weakened the plywood. Many hours were spent on that process but I did get some help from an old friend who was in town for the holidays 🙂

Some of the flooring had horribly dust-filled insulation under it and some of it just opened right up to the baggage compartments below. After some fun cleaning and sneezing the only real job left is to lift up the tracks for the seats before putting down fresh new plywood. As I discovered, though, grinding weld after weld is a messy job. Right now I am halfway done with that. If I’m feeling up to it I might also take down some of the wall panels to replace the insulation there (in case its a dusty and stinky as the other stuff) but for now, it’s back to school… hopefully I’ll get out there over the next couple weekends and be ready for construction soon 😀