Follow Our Progress
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April 21st
2004
We're feeling a little less anxious this week. We took a trip
to Sierra Vista and spent an entire day there which helped a bit with
the feeling of being trapped in the middle of nowhere. While we
were in the "big city" we stopped in at an automotive paint
supply store and talked with someone about how to deal with the exterior
of our ugly old bus...
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Today Becky and I started working on prepping the
bus. Our task is not as simple as we had hoped it might
be.
One problem that we face is that the last paint job that the
bus received was not automotive paint. It's peeling in
quite a few places and chips off without much effort.
The original paint color of the bus was white. It looks
like it was changed to green and yellow at some point.
Probably when it was a San Francisco transit bus. That
paint is tough and seems to be pretty high quality. |
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The black and off-white kind of yellowish color
that the bus is now was applied without any primer. The
off-white color sticks pretty well, but the black color flakes
off easily.
Bottom line, we have a bit of a mess to deal with...
We're trying to get all of the chipped off paint feathered
smooth and then apply a special paint that the auto paint supply
shop suggested. It's a rust inhibitor and apparently will
stick to almost anything without lifting the old paint. |
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We spent about 4 hours or so working on the face
of the bus. We bought a sample of the paint to try on a
relatively small section of the bus. The face has about
the least amount of metal to paint, so we thought that we'd do
that section first.
Tomorrow we'll finish prepping and if the wind stops blowing
in the afternoon again we'll shoot a couple of coats on the bus
and see how it turns out. If it looks good after a couple
of days, we'll make a trip back to Sierra Vista for a whole case
of paint to do the rest of the bus. |
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Hey AJ! I was right about what it was that
made the weird marks on the road...
We came across a train of 3 wagons heading back to
Elfrida. They're part of the Vision Quest group just to
the East of where we're at. Pretty neat to see the wagons
- they looked like pretty authentic reproductions.
Farther down the road we saw a group of teepees being set
up. I think the wagons were going to stop there for the
night... |
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