I got to work on one of the ‘might as well’ jobs that we ARE doing: painting the inside of the exterior walls. It’s in great shape, rust-wise, overall, but we want to make sure we arrest any rust in its place and also give ourselves a nice clean base to start with.

After rubbing down the surface with paint thinner, I used Rustoleum spray paint to give a fresh coat of paint to the bus. Since all of this will be covered up very shortly, I was able to get whatever colours I wanted, and have so far used white, yellow, and what Grampa referred to as ‘puke green.’ The can calls it Key Lime. Anywhere where this is rust will be scraped off and painted over, but there are only a few patches, so mostly this job is going pretty quickly.

We did discover, though, that spray cans aren’t really meant for large surfaces: each one was only doing about 7’ of length, and with 40’ on each side plus the roof…We ended up going to Home Depot today and buying a 5 gallon bucket of mis-tinted Kilz. In exchange for buying a green that truly should be named ‘puke,’ we paid just 29.00 instead of the 121.00 it should have been. Hopefully I can get the rest of it brushed on this week, with the help of a baby blue spray can I got to do all of the channels and ridges. With the green brushed on in between, it will be just BE-YOU-TI-FUL!

I have to admit that as much as most people hate it, I love the smell of paint thinner and turpentine, so I was happy as a clam wiping the walls down. Growing up, I was often the only one allowed in Grampa’s studio, and we had Friday night craft nights and many, many, many projects in there. While his new studio smells entirely wrong (non-toxic, I suppose the word is), his old studio was just so layered with the scent of turps for his oil paints that it smells like him and long days working on operational volcanoes, lino prints, bird houses, silkscreen, and whatever other schemes we could come up with, and I love it. I guess now its our turn to make a smelly space for him to work in—stay tuned for him to make many appearances in Bustar’s life!

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November 21st, 2014

And the password is 4905-A

Bustar drives south

The first project

our 1972 GMC 4905A (Buffalo Bus)

November 21^st, 2014