2026 Week 9

February 23rd - Mar 1st

And then almost nothing happened, again.

My bad back and a week of travel means not much was going to happen… but! I did manage to sneak in a few little items in on Sunday afternoon, so there was progress! Minimal, but still.

Hubcaps and Window Frames

I have been curious as to how bad the hubcaps are under the coat of black paint. I figured it was an easy task to pop them off and strip the paint to see what they looked like.

And for once, an easy task turned out to be an easy task. Very rare for me. The wheels stripped quickly and exposed the … meh? … chrome underneath. On two of the wheels it was “OK”. On the two other wheels, it was “less than OK.”

Pretty easy to see the difference side-by-side. But at least they don’t have too much rust, just some bad chrome.

After stripping the paint off of all four hubcaps, I put the two best on the driver side and I think it’s a decent improvement without much effort.

With that small victory, I got more ambitious. I decided to redo the window frames on the front doors to make them keep the outside out .. and the inside in, but mostly to keep the outside out. There is a lot of missing rubber and a few missing parts on the frames.

Frames come out of the door with just a few screws, so far, so good…

I removed the 3 pieces of glass from each frame and stored them in a ‘secure location’. AKA on top of some storage totes way in the back where no one goes. As long as I can get them done before the Christmas decorations need to come out, I’m good to go.

Anyway, the windows came apart easily enough. The frames are are one big piece with a bunch of little pieces screwed or riveted in. Despite some rust and some sticking, a bit of the torch and some PB Blaster got the screws out. I hesitated on removing the rivets, because I’ve never done rivets that aren’t pop rivets… but that’s kinda how this whole bus is going, so I drilled them suckers out.

Everything separated, I hopped online and bought a couple of used replacement parts and a couple of new reproduction parts. That’s about as far as I got in a Sunday afternoon, but better than nothing.

Maybe more next week,…but then again maybe not!