So far our bus build hasn’t really been much of a build, more of just shuffling things around. We have managed to get the bus home, pull the seats out but haven’t managed to get rid of them yet. We took a load of about 10 to the local scrap yard in the back of the Highlander but quickly got turned around because they wouldn’t accept them with foam and vinyl on them. Damn. One more thing to do.
So we set to work, bought a fresh new box cutter and a pry bar and tore our seats apart. We lined up all 22 seats outside of the bus, made lateral cuts through the vinyl all the way around the bottom of the seat backs then just pulled the vinyl and seat foam right off.
With two box cutters and a bit of motivation, Sarah and I had all the seats stripped in about an hour then all was left was to use a pry bar and my hand-forged blacksmithing hammer “Mjolnir” (thanks to my friend Brandon Vaughn of Voodoo Forge for holding my hand while we made this a few years back) to pry out the plywood strip that the vinyl is actually stapled to at the bottom of the seat back.
Because it was a Saturday and the scrap yard was closed, we loaded the seat frames and all the trash that came off of them, back into the bus to await Monday. Feeling the need to make a little more headway on the project, I took down the first valence panel along the upper edge of the windows just to check for mold and to glimpse the actual guts of the bus before we called it a day.
Feeling content with our half-day’s work, we packed up, ate some sandwiches and hit the nearest brewery in old town Springfield. Tomorrow I’ll be back to hopefully rip out the rest of the valences, pull off the remainder of the crossing arm assembly and maybe start in on removing some rivets in the ceiling.
The Errorington's: a chronicle of adventure in Modern North America 