The question I get asked most is, "Did it ever run?" ;-) Yes! The last inspection was in 1992. When the inspection was about to expire, I took the bus to an Exxon to have it inspected. The fuse panel started to smoke in the garage and they kicked me out. That was the last time it was officially on the road.

To me the obvious place to start was the exterior. Well, I really shouldn't have started there. I think that's where alot of people get bogged down in their restoration. My advice now is to get it running around the block and then improve it from there. THEN work on the cosmetics - no matter how ugly the vehicle looks.

OK, so I started stripping off the 5 or more layers of paint. I started removing the paint using a chemical stripper. The fumes were horrible. So I switched to an orange-based stripper. It worked well in most places, however not on the original primer. In some areas the paint was completely resistant to the stripper (especially at the top of the bus where it had been baked by the sun). There was no other way to deal with it other than to use a sanding disc and/or abrasive wheel.

I used a mixture of Phosphoric acid and Metal Ready (with zinc) to wash the bus in between sanding. I have experimented with acid-etch primer and zinc-rich primer. So far, the toughest is the acid-etching primer over a zinc solution. It creates this weird layer as you see here that is very resistive to rust formation. I will end up re-sanding the entire bus and applying an acid-etching primer once I have gotten all the remaining paint off. This was the a lot of work. I wish I had been in Dallas or Houston and been able to rent soda-blasting equipment.

If you are thinking of stripping, be prepared to spend a lot of money on stripper, gloves, masks, stripper, sanding discs, etc. etc. It really is cheaper to blast on a large project.

These pictures are in the back yard of a house we used to live in. That was a drought year (2002), which made it easy working outside. Unfortunately, that year was followed by a couple of wet years - making it almost impossible to work in the back yard. I now have a dry garage.