Unsealing the ceiling

Unsealing the ceiling

Nov 17, 2020

Bel here!
We've spent a lot of time recently working on research and getting caught up trying to motivate to go outside in the cold and put the research to use. We took a roof panel down, and recording that whole effort turned into fun times with video resolution. Modern cameras have gotten ridiculous. We started using an Obsbot Tail (A fantastic gift from Els family), and found out if you don't adjust the settings and leave it recording a montage you just might wind up with 50 gigs of 4k 60 fps video. So sorting through that has been a fun exercise for my computer. If I can't get all of that monster video to work we will at least record a (much shorter) overview of what we did and how.

Taking a single roof panel out took ages though. There were so many screws, and quite a few of them were ready to turn from a Phillip's head into a circle with little to no effort. We've both gotten pretty good at removing stripped screws at this point.

Removing that last back chair/support/thing was surprisingly hard. It involved a large amount of angle grinding.
The end result being one bolt that had decided to become one with its hex-nut


So besides stripped screws and welded bolts, we've managed to put together some pretty solid floor plan ideas! El has been hard at work designing all sorts of ways to layout the bus. That's a whole writeup on its own though, and I'll be letting her have those honors.





Currently we are facing one speedbump and one roadblock. The speedbump here is that we need to get new insulation in. We are thinking it makes the most sense to only insulate the back third well (Where we will be sleeping), and leaving the rest of Liz pretty untouched insulation-wise. This makes sense for us in terms of cost savings as well as effort, but we are still trying to go through all the best kinds of insulation. Our current thinking is spray-on insulation with foam boards on the sides and possibly underneath. This blog here has one of the better write-ups of comparisons I've found, but we are going to do a good rundown of our own as well soon.
The big roadblock is the AC unit.

After removing the plastic casing, I discovered my nemesis.
This unit is only attached to the roof with a few screws, and dropping it down would be easy. But its got the ac lines running into it from the front of the vehicle (The ac pumps are shown in our Engine Rambling video). Removing the unit without disconnecting those lines is a Bad Idea, as the lines are fairly rigid and very likely to break if we don't disconnect them. Disconnecting them would require draining the entire system, which is... Not Easy.
Unfortunately we will need to get behind that roof panel in order to put new insulation up there.
Honestly I'd love help with this one. Does anyone have experience draining AC systems? What tools are needed? I've seen this done in theory, but never done it in practice, and any advice would be lovely.

Thanks y'all,

Lots of love and safe travels out there
~Bel

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