(Sub-floor bit continues from Part 1, here.)
So before I could finish up with the floor (to behind the captain’s chair), I had to place the seats to insure that they’d have supports under them. You may recall that I said that I wanted to use some of the bus seats because they already had DOT approved seat-belt attachments. And DOT approved seat belts, so that was another thing in their favor.
But they also have a whole lot of padding on the back that we wouldn’t need, and would eat into the
available living space. So, I went about taking off the padding and getting them down to the structural stuff. I had some hopes that it would be really easy, as other people had described tearing the seats down being a simple matter of loosening the outer vinyl covering at the base and sliding it off, then unscrewing some plywood or metal from the frame and taking it and the affixed padding off. Not so with our seats.
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| Ahh, the look and feel of safety! |
When they built our bus in 1995, Blue Bird meant for those seats to be super-safe and last. So I found that the vinyl wasn’t just sort of stapled and sewn closed at the bottom of the back of the seat, but it was also glued. In some places the glue had adhered to the padding. In other places, the steel. Thus, it didn’t so much slide as tear in taking it off. There was indeed (as you can see in the photo) a nice steel panel in there that the padding was glued to, but it wasn’t screwed to the frame, it was welded. So in order to get to taking the steel off, the padding had to be torn away, and then the grinding, beating with a 3# hammer or hammer and chisel, and prying with a bar could commence.
I had three seats to do this with, and there were casualties. My poor Makita angle-grinder lost some teeth on the gear-disc, and the ages-old Wonderbar lost out on both ends. But, to their credit, they did so on the last of the three chairs, and the hammer and chisel saved the day.
By now, you’re probably asking why I bothered to take the sheets of steel out of the structural frame of the chairs if they were so much trouble? The answer is that I wanted to use the area behind the seat as storage that would be accessed by lifting the seat back, and that the back of the seat with four legs would block half a window in the cabin of the bus if I left it full size. Which meant that I still had work to do before I could figure out where to put the chair supports, because the seat with a lowered back could sit closer to the wall.
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| A clean frame ready to be shortened. |
After the procurement of a new angle grinder, I began surgery. It was pretty simple in theory, just cut the ‘U’ frame above the existing join, remove the extra along the outside, then slide the top down over the inner square supports that come up from the seat’s main frame. Easy!
I’ve heard some of the skoolie guys say that cutting the metal on a skoolie is like getting a tattoo – you’re trepidatious about the first few cuts, but then you’re comfortable and almost itching to cut more. Well, I was certainly trepidatious. What if I cut too much? But if I didn’t cut, nothing could proceed, so I went about the cutting.
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| Not perfect, but a good fit! |
After the initial cuts went well and the top came off, I figured my measures and took off the outside extra and refit things and … it looked fine! Which got me to my first use of my MIG welder.
So, I wire-wheeled things to get a good weld, clamped things up, and got ready to weld. I learned how to weld using a stick welder, so the self-feeding aspect of the MIG was a little odd to get used to. I have a little Lincoln 20 amp unit, and while I didn’t get my ‘sizzling egg’ sounds all the time, I got a decent weld in a fairly short time, and things proceeded apace.
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| All finished and in place! |
With the seat finished, I was able to set it in place and figure out where the supports should go under the plywood sub-floor. Now, under this seat you might note the square steel plate on top of the felt. This covers the sending unit in the fuel tank. If anything ever goes wrong with the fuel gauge, I’ll need to get in there, so I had to plan for access there. Not a perfect place if you note the angled 12 gauge steel panel under the end of the seat. But more on this later.
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| All the seats in proto-place! |
With the other two seats laid out in place, I was able to set the braces under them, and then set the insulation in.
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| And just like shiny magic it’s done! |
And with that done, it was a simple matter to put down two big sheets of plywood to cover it up. Well, except for the 1″ wide steel rail that seats would attach to that runs about 12″ off the floor. One of the problems that arose was when I cut a piece to fit perfectly all the way from side to side. As I was putting it in place, I found that that 1″ was enough to stop the angled piece from sliding down the wall and into shape. Luckily, the 1/2″ plywood was fairly bendy and if I stood on it, I could get it to bend *just* enough that it would snap past the seat rail and into place.
And that put the basic floor down in place for all but the ‘bridge’ and bathroom. More on those later …
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