2026 Week 3

January 12th - 18th, 2026

More windshield work.

Yup, still futzing with the windows. I enjoy futzing with things and this bus is extremely futzable. Dangerous combination. The windows part of this experience is coming to a close soon…. I hope. My goal for this was to get down to bare metal to see how bad the windows really were. They weren’t terrible at all, but there were spots for me to try out new things.

More Paint Removal

I still had quite a bit of paint left before bare metal. I thought that since the paint stripper worked reasonably well for the first coat, why not try it on the remaining paint. There was also a small scrape of rust under the passenger window. I wanted to see how bad the rust was, so I put some stripper on there as well.

Paint stripper around the window

The removal of the paint from the scar shows the original color of the bus quite well. It’s got “Pearl White” on it’s M-plate, and that looks like it to me:

Little bit of paint missing from the front of the bus

Metal work

I wanted to .. practice, I guess? Or maybe closer to: I wanted to see if I could do it without screwing it up majorly. Which aare pretty much the same.

Anyway, I got the wirewheel on the drill and started grinding away at the remaining dirt and rust and stubborn paint. On this photo, I’ve done the left side.

Bus nose half clean

There were a few spots where the metal was pretty badly pitted and had missing pieces. It likeely would have been fine, but it was a chance to practice some thin metal welding. I read a tip to put some copper behind thin metal, as the copper acts as a heatsink and welds won’t stick to it. I bought the smallest piece of copper pipe I could from the Depot and smashed it into a rectangle. Clamp it behind the steel and …

Fancy welding jams

weld a bunch of spot welds to build up the metal :

Welding Jam 2

It’s ugly, but it was my first attempt. My other attempts went much better and looked much cleaner. Photos of two repairs (the shiniest parts on the top lip) after grinding and filing:

Ground down welds

During all the welding and grinding and re-welding the ones I screwed up the first time and grinding and grinding and filing and filing, well, the bus started to turn into a workbench.

Junk on the bus

Also, in the first (of what I assume will be near infinite) “Might as well"s… Since I had the glass out, I might as well try to tap that dent out under the passenger window. I spray painted the dent, waited for it to dry …

Paint on the nose

…and sanded it off with a flat sanding block to highlight the high and low spots.

Low spots revealed

I then got the hammer and dolly out and got to tapping to see I had any chance of learning how to knock out dents.

Hammer time on the bus dent

And I kept knocking on them until the next week