1968 Campervan conversion

[Trikky2]

Yes agreed - sandblasting is fine till you find it goes absolutely everywhere and you really dont want it laying around inside body cavities and chassis members.

It will prevent any effective rust prevention or wax injection from working plus it will harbour moisture and start undoing all your fine work. Its definitely worth using that 360 degree body roller and keep turning, blowing, hoovering and rinsing until its all gone.

I had been wondering how you were getting on Its nice to see the latest progress - thanks for posting.

 

[joaonar]

Thanks to you both. Yes, in fact there' still a lot of sand to be removed. I did in fact spent a few hours cleaning it but I should have spent a few more.
Well, next time I will do it.... 8)

So, after a week driving through morocco ....

(one of the only two VW's I saw)

and with air temperatures of 46º/48º celsius ....

... which require drivers of buses and trucks to drive with the engine covers always open ...

8) ... we returned to Portugal and to all the work that's still there to do.
After I saw the paint job with POR-15 I'm really satisfied. It looks great. Once again, I just hope it works well:

But I've already understood why sand felt on top of fresh paint. Hugo was painting the bus alone and rotating it alone also... suddenly, weight was to much for him and the bus decided to start rotating for itself until the brackets hit violently against the bodyroller making it all start shaking strongly. So, lesson nº 1: never try to rotate this alone!

as result, sand on top of fresh paint:

brackects a litle bit beaten:

but they are both alright 8)

 

[Trikky2]

Wow! Lucky escape with the body roller. Could have been nasty - glad he got away with it.

That underside is looking splendid - probably better than when it was new

I knew it got hot in Morocco but 46 - 47 is "phew". Without air-conditioning I should think it must be a nightmare. I start finding it too hot at 33 - 34 :lol:

What were you doing in Morocco - its surely too hot to go there on vacation in the summer? I have been thinking of going there in winter sometime. What did you think of it - would you recommend it? Any do's and dont's?

 

[joaonar]

Trikky2, thanks. Yes, the underside is great. Now I need to use Tie-coat Primer and after I will paint it using the same paint that I will use on the body...

I went there from 18 of June to 26 on holidays. It was very, very hot there. We traveled about 5.000 km's and once in Marocco it was always under 38º to 48º... and yes, we always stayed in hotels with air-conditioning and I had never used so much the air-conditioning of my car. But, you can always see a lot of police dressed in black, under that blazing sun, with a portable speeding radar, completely alone on highways sides.... it's surreal. That and people crossing the highway like if they were walking on sidewalks....
And yes... the traffic is incredible with no one stopping for people crossing on pedestrians crossings. Just don't try to be polite, since the car behind you will pass you (left or right)... I did it once or twice the first km's!

Yes, I recommend... There are lot of nice places to visit but be prepared for always be surrounded of people trying to sell you something 8) .... everywhere!
I found people to be very friendly and I didn't have any kind of problem.

Dont's ? well, if you're planning in driving around the country, try to use only highways since driving in National roads can be a big and dangerous adventure ....

 

[joaonar]

about the bus, even with the sand getting in every holes and spaces, I decided to go on with the rest of what I had already in mind. So I started cleaning the interior. At first I was feeling that I was making a very slow progress but in the end I was a lot happier. 1/3 is already cleaned. 8)

And I kept rotating the bus while I was cleaning it:

since I had to return to Lisbon, I left it this way....

 

[joaonar]

so.... hello to you all, once again.
After a few months without updating this thread, here I'm again....

Well... after these pictures im my last post, a lot of work was made on the bus. I'm not sure it it was a good work but I just hope so 8)
So let's update this:

After a few days, I went back to Hugo's bodyshop and found it being repainted... finally!

... so I went to see how the bus was.....

... and I found that in a week or so, a couple ob small birds had made their nest inside it. Unfortunately, I had to take it off since I was planning to finish the sandblasting task during the following days.

 

[joaonar]

a couple of days later, Hugo's bodyshop was almost finished...

... and while Hugo was painting his floor, I took the sandblaster outside and got prepared to start again this tedious task. However, some seals had to be taken off so I asked for Hugo's help and expertise

.... fortunately there was no superficial rust since I left all the body panels without any kind of rust prevention:

 

[joaonar]

so, with all the small seals off the bus I started cleaning it untill (once again) a small part of the sandblaster got broken...

.... and it stayed like this, until the following weekend.

 

[joaonar]

However, before returnig home, I left some paint stripper acting, just to be easier to remove the paint with the sandblaster:

... at least, some part of the task was being made alone 8)

 

[joaonar]

a few days later, when I returned to Tondela, Hugo's already had his place working at 100%:

... and once again, I returned to this awful task...
I will never do this again! :mrgreen:

but, even in midle of August, the weather was becoming very cloudy... and I needed some dry weather to finish this task:

..... but the worse was yet to come :evil: !

 

[joaonar]

my plan was to clean the entire bus... and I was saving recycled sand, that by being used several times gets turned into dust...or almost dust. I wanted to use this sand for cleaning the bus from the outside, with a lower air pressure and already used ceramic nozzles. But while I was cleaning in the interior I completely forgot that some of the panels that you actually see from the inside are the same on the outside... Yes, I know...Sometimes I'm so stupid!

so when I was filling the sandblaster I realised that some of the body panels where bent in some places... I just couldn't believe in what my eyes were seeing....

The end result?? a ****** work....to say the least.

 

[joaonar]

to end this fantastic day and since the bus couldn't get any worse we decided to continue the task untill the end...

untill, after a while I decided to take a look to Hugo's 270 L, 400 volts air compressor and I realized there was oil all over it.... The electric motors were fine, but the heads and cilinders were completely busted....
If the day was turning into a very bad one, seeing the air compressor in this state just turned what was left of the that day into a real nightmare....

Going home in middle of August with this weather was the perfect scenario to end that surreal day:

Beautiful!.... :|

 

[joaonar]

... and just to remember that in March 2010, Hugo spent some working hours doing this task:

... and after a few hours, they were almost like new...

It just took me a couple of hours to bent them again....
:evil:

 

[joaonar]

Since the air compressor wasn't working I decided to give the cleaning task as finished... in fact, there wasn't any major areas left to be cleaned and as I had a few days left, I spent them cleaning all the sand from the bus (or at least, trying to clean it).
In the last one, I decided to use my por-15 products on the interior floor of the bus. Since I used a brush instead of a paint pistol, the end result was not a perfect one... but that's not important since all areas I painted are going to be covered in several ways and never to be seen again 8) :

I ended leaving Hugo's bodyshop at midnight, with a 300 Km's journey ahead...

 

[joaonar]

A few weeks later, I returned to Hugo's bodyshop to get some more work around the bus done.
The first task of the day was to push the bus inside the bodyshop. Onde there, Hugo started to get all the panels straight again:

 

[joaonar]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suflbA3DwbE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBcFiA3l5q4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17k8r54rKlI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh7wcOaghpk

 

[joaonar]

here's a picture of my interior paint job... a very poor one but no one will ever see it again.

.... and a 100 L air compressor I bought to replace th big one while it was repairing. With it, we manage to make some progress on the remaining tasks.

After Hugo finished repairing my body panels, it was time to finish some other small tasks... like grinding some welding excesses..

 

[joaonar]

there were some areas that needed to be welded... areas that appeared when I was sandblasting it:

... there was another task that I wanted to do. I wanted to drill some small holes in all the hollow areas of the bus....

I used the holes we made to remove sand that was inside these cavities and afterwards I used them to spray my por-15 products. I will also use them to spray some wax after the bus is painted.

 

[joaonar]

... in the end:

I do have some proper caps that I bought from frost.co.uk to use on them.

 

[joaonar]

and since we were making holes on the bus, I decided that we had to make some more:

8)