Bus Build - Part 7
Doing some interior, electrical, and polishing work from Sept 20-26, 2018. This week we dealt with a lot of rain, truck events, and other obstacles that took time away from the build. We are still waiting for the license plate, so if anyone knows anyone at the state DMV who can hurry it up, we would appreciate it!
My cousin Kyle and I were having a drink and talking about this blog and he kindly informed me that my blog posts have contained some redundancies and run on sentences. I figured I should let everyone know that I usually don’t re-read what I type, so thank you to all who read and fight through the bad spelling and worse grammar.
As you can see I started polishing the full side of the bus and it is truly a delight to get a full side done. This is just the first round of polishing for the side, it still needs 3 more rounds to bring out its true brilliance. It is a little overwhelming with how much time it takes to go over the surface. There is a lot of area and none of it is perfectly flat which creates some hiccups when using a polishing wheel at 3500rpm. This week was my first bus injury when the polishing wheel caught an edge, twisted and caught the back of both of my hands while spinning at full speed. I did not include a picture because its kind of gross, but it should not be a long healing process because it only took a few layers of skin.
Wiring the bus was another task I took on this week. This is a job that always makes me nervous because getting shocked really sucks. Most of the wire runs are easy to trace and are in working order, but there are a few that need reworked such as the fan, interior lights, and the running lights. I was able to work my way through the wires with the amazingly detailed manual that came with the vehicle. With the help of this book, and my general knowledge of electricity I was able to get the interior lights working properly, the fan operating at full blast, and developed a plan for the running lights outside.
The brake lights were not all functioning when we picked up this bus, and I was finally able to get around to tracing down that problem. I was thinking it was going to be an in depth tracing of wire runs, but it turns out it was just a bad bulb. A bad bulb is usually a simply swap, but on this bus the parts are difficult to find. It took some deep internet searching but I was able to get 3 spare GE 4414r lamps off of ebay. We may upgrade to new LED lights at some point but there is still something interesting about having the original lights.
Thank you all for reading this and I hope my grammar and spelling was better this week. Until next time, have a good one!