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Refinishing the exterior was one of largest single jobs on the bus. It occupied the bulk of my time over the summer. You can see from the before pictures that it started out in pretty rough shape; sitting outside for a few years had taken its toll in accumulated grime and surface rust. After installing the outside sheeting I had blobbed silicone over all the rivets to stop them from rusting out.
This left me with a very large amount of preparation before I could even start to paint. The edges and corners all needed to be filled in with bondo; the silicone needed to be stripped from each individual rivet (and there are a lot of rivets); the rusted areas needed to have all the loose rust removed with a wire brush; the entire surface needed to be sanded to remove the grime and roughen it up enough for good paint adhesion.
I chose a two-part marine epoxy for the exterior. It's about the toughest paint out there. It dries into a thin plastic-like coating and should be a good choice to protect the bus from the elements.
Since I had nothing available which was large enough to house the bus, all the painting had to be done outdoors. So rather than stripping the entire outside and then painting everything at once, I did it piecemeal to minimize the amount of bare metal exposed at any given time.
The beautiful blue tarp in the first picture is there because at that point there is an empty frame awaiting it's window in the transition.
After finishing the exterior painting in the summer of 2009, the fall and winter project was the construction of an articulating antenna mast. Before painting, I epoxied a pair 2"x2" pieces of angle iron running the length of each roof. The purpose was to act as mounting rails for the future addition of rooftop equipment; the first piece equipment in that plan was some sort of antenna mast that would collapse to a minimal height while driving, but when parked could be deployed to loft my antennas to maximal height.
I ended up with a folding antenna platform, which in the deployed mode can hoist my antennas over 30' up. It's noticable taller than the peak of my parents barn. The picture at right is a little deceptive - it's not quite as much taller as it appears there.
There are a pair of 4500N satellite dish actuators mounted at the base of the mast which are responsible for moving between deployed and retracted mode. When retracting, the black support structure folds to the right and the upper mast to the left, and the whole thing neatly sets down at about the height of the upper roof. I'll post pictures of the retracted mast and a video of it deploying at some point.
Mounted on the upper mast is an NTE U-105 rotor and TB-105 thrust bearing supporting a piece of electrical conduit to which the antennas themselves are attached. The radios are a pair of Bullet2 HPs made by Ubiquiti Networks. One is attached to a 12dBi omnidirectional antenna to act as an AP and provide wireless to the bus and surrounding areas; the other is a 24dBi directional grid which I use as a backhaul link. Both are attached to and powered by the infrastructure at my desk.
I use 802.1q VLANs and multiple SSID support in the AP radio to provide both a secured wireless network with direct access to my bus systems and a public wireless network bridged to the backhaul link.
The final addition to the antenna mast was a set of three 85-watt Matrix Photowatt PW750-85 solar panels. Most solar systems on vehicles are mounted flat on the roof, or with a single-axis tilt mechanism driven by hand. I didn't want to mount my panels flat against the roof as they would then grime up pretty quick; plus the difference in net power output between flat-mount panels and a two-axis tracking system is almost a factor of two. I also didn't want to deal with manually raising and tilting the panels each time the bus is moved. Since the bus might potentially be parked in any orientation, and tilt system should ideally allow a large range of motion along both axes.
I ended up attaching the solar array to the antenna with a deployment arm so that the antenna deployment actuators will raise the solar panels at the same time. Another pair of actuators take care of tilting the array - it can reach around 70° from the vertical in any direction.