Started the week by cleaning down the areas stripped of paint last week, followed by applying a coat of aluminium primer to the underneath of the canopy and some white etch primer around the front destination screen. I won’t use that again, though. I continued painting, rescuing some undercoat from the remains in the Johnstones tin and used it for the front destination box around the screen and for some of the waist rail. I noticed some main damage to the N/S waist rail beading, which needs attending to, so I left that section for now. At this point in the week, illness struck so work was temporarily halted.
Tag Archives: paint
4/10/2026
A good start to the week, with all of the underside of the front canopy almost ready for paint. A minor diversion was the repair of one of the route number box bulb holders, the contact spring for the bulb having broken. I found this when I went to install the correct size 12W bulbs. Once the underside of the canopy and the area around the cab emergency window had been stripped, I cleaned the surfaces thoroughly and cleaned up the paint shavings. Next I applied a coat of no.1 rust beater to all the steelwork, then primed the exposed wood work. Whilst that dried, the last job of the week was to treat the rusty steelwork of the rear route number box with ACF50, it being impossible to access it to replace it, without dismantling the whole of the rear dome. This was the last job of the week.
25/5/2025
Painted the new front O/S wing, using etch primer I bought for the roof, evil smelling stuff which I don’t think I will use on the roof. Coo Var has some water-based all-metals primer, grey in colour, which seems a better choice. Next job was to paint the final coats on the battery trays, using chassis silver. While they were drying, I looked out the battery cables and measured out what I need, 4m from the nearside battery to the cab, 2m linking the batteries and 2m from offside to the cab. I also removed the remaining original battery cable from under the bus. A poor start on Thursday saw me using the wrong (water-based) primer over the etch primer on the new front O/S wing. Attempts to remove it when it was dry proved fruitless so I coated i with chassis silver in the hope that sealing it would fix the problem. Things impproved with the removal of the rotted conduit from the recovered battery cables, I found I had enough good cable to wire the new arrangement of batteries although some of it will need new insulation, which is on order. I had to make a minor adjustment to the floor aperture for the offside battery tray, as I had made the tray slightly too big. This job took pretty much all of Friday, but the result was worthwhile and neat in the end. I decided next to clean the paint and rust off the control box side panel, ready for painting. Final job of the week was to apply a coat of wood primer to the enlargded aperture for the battery tray, and the top of the chassis on the offside, which was exposed when the old tray was removed.