Follow Our Progress
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November 8th
2003
We got our Jeep back from the shop again. Yesterday the clutch
hose between the master and slave cylinder gave out. Becky got
stuck in the driveway with no way to put the Jeep back into gear.
My friend Dave came to the rescue with his truck and towed the Jeep back
to the shop. They didn't charge us any labor, but the hose cost us
almost $50.00, so it wasn't a cheap fix. We have the Jeep back now
and it seems to be working fine... for now at least...
We went out to the bus around 9:00 this morning to try to get some
work done on installing the wood burning stove. I was feeling a
bit depressed about how many days this week were spent sitting around
the house waiting for the Jeep to get fixed or dealing with other things
that kept us away. I've been frustrated with the progress on the bus
lately. It seems that not much gets done anymore. That has
made working on the bus more of a chore than an enjoyable
project.
I am feeling some pressure to make up for lost time now. I find
myself less tolerant of all the usual distractions caused by the
kids. I feel like a baby sitter of 4 kids at times. They are
usually pretty good, but some times they treat the bus like a playground
and are constantly under foot and in the way. I wish the weather
was better so I could send them all outside to play, but so far it has
been too cold and muddy outside.
I am at the bus to work toward getting it done. It seems at
times that it's impossible to get anything done with the kids stopping
me all of the time for things that they need. The two boys are
constantly running in and out of the bus and tracking in mud and dog
crap from the back yard. I don't feel comfortable telling them
that they have to stay away or say in the back room. They are good
kids and all of them just want to play, but I just can't work in the bus
with them running around anymore.
I don't know how to deal with the problem, so I guess for now I just
have to deal with the frustration until I get a chance to talk to
everyone about it...
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Becky and I started out the day by finishing up the lath
pieces. We took down the ones that were there for the
window and changed it so that there would be some support over
it's span.
We put up some new plywood sheeting where the window panel
used to be. It was a bit frustrating to take down
something that was already finished, but I kept reminding myself
that the wood burning stove was going to be fun, so I finally
started feeling a bit better.
I thought that I could just swap in a new panel, but it
turned out that the new panels were bigger in both width and
length. They were cut to 8'1/2"x4'1/4". I
don't have any way to accurately cut off a strip that thin along
the entire length of the sheet, so I had to modify the lower
panel pieces and live with the uneven seams.
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Once the paneling was in place we went to work on the box to
cover the wheel well.
It took a bit of thought to come up with the dimensions that
I wanted. We had to decide what we were going to do with
the face of the box and decided that we were not going to tile
the sides all the way to the floor, so I had to leave enough
room all the way around for 1/2 inch MDF.
Once we had the specifics down, the construction actually
went pretty fast. We built 3 mini walls out of
2"x2" lumber and spaced them out 6" all the way
around the wheel well.
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We took a cue from the old raised platforms and beveled the
corners about 6" or so. We also added in an extra
support along the wall and in the middle to keep the platform
from sagging.
We decided to add 1/2 inch plywood as well as 1/2 inch cement
board to the top to provide support and prevent the tiling from
flexing much.
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I tried to involve the kids in the process by having them all
test to make sure that our new wood stove platform will be
strong enough.
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Putting the cement backer board in place turned out to be a
piece of cake. It can be cut and snapped almost exactly
like sheetrock.
We added 1/2 inch strips of MDF to the edges of the platform
so I could just trace along the bottom and get the exact
measurements of our box.
Then we flipped the cement board over, scord along the lines
and snapped it. Once the other side was trimmed, we
flipped it back over and put it on top of the 1/2" plywood.
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The last step was filing smooth the rough edge left by snapping
off the pieces.
We found out at this point that we had the cement board
upside down, but the only major difference is that the side we
had up was a bit smoother and had a paper strip with the
manufacturer label on it.
The label stated that we could just wet the side we had accidentally
used to remove the label... Apparently we were not the
first to think that the smooth label side was the top
<grin>.
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We did some test positioning of the stove to find
the best place in the ceiling to put the stove pipe.
It turns out that our original
idea worked out best for cutting into the ceiling. |
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Becky and I pretty much eyeballed the location for
the stove pipe on the ceiling.
I drilled a few holes so I would have something to go by when
cutting out the hole on the roof.
Once I had everything pretty much lined up where I wanted it,
I used the jigsaw with a bimetal cutting blade to cut out the
hole from the roof side.
I filed off the edges smooth and then spray painted the edges
to cover the bare metal and prevent rusting. |
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We put the pipe through the hole and put the
flashing, storm shield and cap in place.
I didn't glue the flashing down because it was too cold and a
bit damp by the time we finished. |
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The last step was to build a fire!
We built a nice big fire in the stove to test out the stove
pipe and make sure everything would be safe.
We got it hot enough to cause the paint coating on the
outside of the stove to smoke and fill the bus with some pretty
nasty fumes. We opened up the escape hatch in the back of
the bus, opened the front door and turned on the fan to exhaust
the smoke and fumes. It worked well, but cooled off the
bus in a hurry too...
I thought that we had burned off most of the fumes when we
fired it up outside, but it looks like it will take a few more
big fires to bake the paint on.
Other that that, there was no problem with heat. The
cement board on the wall got pretty hot, but there is about a 3
inch gap between the wood paneling and the cement board in that
location. The back side of the cement board was warm, but
not too hot to keep my hand in place. I will add layer of
fiberglass insulation between the cement board and the wood
paneling. That should keep the paneling from getting hot
at all. |
I am glad that we got to at least light a fire today. We still
need to finish insulating and securing the cement backer board as well
as tiling. There's still a lot to do, but for now we can at least
burn some of the scrap wood that has been piling up all over the place
and save some of the gas that we were using with the forced air heating
for other things while we are working on the bus. |
