October 5th 2003 For those who've emailed me, wondering what I've been up to...you can now get your voyeuristic fix at my Blogspot. I'm using it as a space to update more frequently, polish my writing skills, and to write more personal things. Work will resume on my van when I have free time. Your guess is as good as mine when that will be. :-) |
Fiberglassing And Painting! |
Sanded off all of the icky rust and scraped some mysterious goo off the floor. I'm still tring to figure out if the goo is a gummily petrified mouse, or lumpy melted caramels. Gave the floor a nice coat of Rustoleum Rusty Metal Primer. The floor looks better already! Later I'll cover it with a plywood subfloor, and some sort of finish flooring. I wish I could lay my hands on some cheap cork flooring. |
Ahhh, good ol' pop riveting! How I missed it this past week. :-) The metal fingers I'm applying are sold at the local auto parts store. They make sub par or non existant wheelwells spiffy again. Mine were rusty and didn't have a clean edge. |
I accidentally got some fiberglass fibers in my eye while cutting the mat. I found it was easier to squiggle halfway underneath the van while trimming...I could see what I was doing better and was out of the way of falling fibers. |
Peeew! Fiberglass Resin Stinks! It makes the cloth look nice and shiny though. :-) |
After 32 square feet of fiberglass matt, this is what's left. Pretty good :-) More than half was used for the driver's side. The other potions were for the passenger rear wheel well and the drivers side front wheelwell. |
As I was underneath the van applying fiberglass resin today, it hit me .... I've never even changed a tire or the oil in my life. I'd be mystified if you handed me a tire wrench or a jack. I'm looking forward to learning more about the mechanical workings of my van! We once had a field hippy named Mindy who was very good at fixing her vehicle. She even carried a spare engine around, just in case. She had to though ... she had a VW Bus. :-) |
The fiberclass coating was still lumpy after going over it with 10 sheets of sandpaper, so I broke out the Bondo. Bondo is so cool! It can be sanded within 20 minutes of application. I Bondoed over everything, sanded it smooth, and applied primer to see any lumpy or crater spots. |
Fiberglass up close |
The votes so far: Light Blue: 21 Dark Blue: 24 Green: 30 Purple: 44 Red: 57 Rainbow: 25 Flowers: 13 Cow Spots: 24 Orange: 11 Camoflauge: 1 Green With Flowers: 1 Mural: 1 |
Almost.... |
Nearly There... |
The bottom half is primed! 9/27/03 |
9-30-03 There is now one coat of glossy red enamel on the entire bottom half of the van. As soon as it stops raining and threatening to snow, I'll add another coat, and paint the camper top. The color red won by a mile. Thank you to all who voted! It was fun watching the votes grow. It was also interesting to watch you ballot stuffers at work. There were a couple of people who were really lobbying hard for purple - and I know who at least one of you are. :-) |
October 5th 2003 For those who've emailed me, wondering what I've been up to...you can now get your voyeuristic fix at my Blogspot. I'm using it as a space to update more frequently, polish my writing skills, and to write more personal things. Work will resume on my van when I have free time. Your guess is as good as mine when that will be. :-) |
