2026 Week 4

January 19th - 25th

Finishing up the windshields

I’ve been messing with these windshield frames for a couple of weeks now, and my goal was to get them back into the bus, with repairs that are “good enough” to last until the bus gets painted.

No idea when the paint will happen, but the goal is them to last with just primer for a good long while.

I got the frames cleaned up as best as I could, with the combination of sanding, welding, grinding, sanding, and sanding some more.

The results of the worst of the passenger side:

And of course, also the driver side - not as pretty, but no rust:

I then coated them with a generous amount of rust converter. It turns the iron oxide (ie, rust) into iron phosphate.

While that was doing it’s thing (it takes a day or so to fully convert), I went back to the dented nose that I’ve been pounding, on and off, since the windows were out. I painted the dented area with the only glossy paint I had, a nice meadow green.

Then, using a long, flexible sanding block, I sanded away the paint. This removes all the paint from the ‘high’ spots and highlights the dents, as such:

The rust converter was now dried and done with the rust conversion, so back to the windows. I did some very light filler for a couple of the more pitted areas. I used some JB Weld for the filler. For the small area, it was fine, but anything bigger and I’d break out the Bondo.

Cleaning up nicely:

Saturday was painting priming day! I taped up everything that needed to be taped:

A few layers of UPOL self-etching primer, and …

The end result had tons of errors and problems. I need a lot more practice doing filler and sanding it smooth. I think the JB Weld wasnt the best product, but… “It’s what I had handy”. That’s another quote that will be used quite a bit during this project.

So, the weekend ended without the windshields back in. I guess there is always next week….