2026 Week 2
January 5th - 11th
Why start with the windshields?
I was in shock when I saw the bus in my backyard. I don’t remember much about what was relayed to me , but I do remember being told that the windshields needed immediate attention. I had no idea how to tell if they did or not, but it seemed reasonable. There was some bubbling paint and some rust peeking through under the edge of the rubber seals.
“No problemo,” I thought, “I’ll just pop the windows out, clean up a little rust and pop ’em back in.”
Which definitely could have happened, except, well, I’m me. And I’m not sure why, but I don’t know how to do a quick little task. It always becomes a massive undertaking. With that explained, let’s begin.
Glass out
Taking the glass out was easy enough two step process:
- Cut the rubber seals from the outside, try not to scratch the paint, fail at not scratching the paint, curse a few times, finally cut away all the outside rubber, open the door and push the panes out with one hand while hoping the other hand doesn’t slip and drop the glass.
- Put the glass somewhere safe.
Windshields removed, you can see the rust on the bottom of the driver’s window:
A closer view of the rust after a bit of cleaning up the left side of the opening. You may notice that the front seat is starting to accumulate… crap. I think this may be a trend over time. We shall see.
In grinding the windshield bottom lip, I keep running into the wiper post and spray nozzle:
So I took them out. Photo shows the nozzle still installed:
The next day was Saturday, and my family isn’t sick of me working on the bus yet, so I took the opportunity to strip the paint from the bottom half of the windshield.
I started by taping off everything I didn’t want to strip. As I’ve never stripped the paint off a vehicle before, I went conservative and made sure the tape was keeping everything nice and tidy. Once the tape was on, I painted the open area with the paint stripper. I covered the paint stripper with plastic film to keep it from drying out and left it for a few hours.
Once it was dark enough that I couldn’t see very well, I went back out, to remove the paint stripper. The newer gray paint came right off, but it looked like I’ll have to strip the original paint as well. I’ve thought about preserving the original color (perlweiß), but there’s not enough to save and the bus has already been cut up to make it not worth the investment.
And after cleaning up all the tape and stripped paint mess:
