Framing your bus conversion subfloor is a mistake, do this instead

[Music] in our last episode i showed you how we fabricate and install these handsome custom front doors on our buses and now that my bus is the proud owner of one of those doors it means for the first time since we started this project i'm totally sealed in and protected from the elements just like on a regular house from here forward we can start on the interior build and for us that means starting by installing our insulated subfloor we do things a little bit differently around here and that's why i made this video to share with you some of our tips and tricks and maybe more controversial building methods and products so that if you follow our lead you'll end up with something that is not only going to be insulated and solid but might save you a few steps and a few bucks along the way thanks for tuning in for this edition of the schooly conversion guide let's get started with the old bus subfloor a distant memory i wanted to take a second and talk about the products we're going to be using as we start to rebuild this bus from the ground up and the first place to start if we may is actually by going back a little bit i want to talk about what i like to use when it's time to clean up that rusty metal floor pan i see a lot of folks getting in there with the wire brushes and that is fine but will take you forever and then i see a lot of other people going with the wire wheels for their angle grinders and that looks like a great choice but one thing you have to be careful with is not all wire wheels are the same this wire wheel here is actually called a braided wire wheel and that is a very important distinction because if you think of a normal wire wheel you have this center hub and you have just wires coming out of it radially and that's really good for light rust removal but my big beef with that is because the wires are just kind of like whiskers floating in space when you're using it they go flying and they'll end up in your pant legs in your skin worst case in your eye and they also don't really stand up to the task of removing really deep embedded rust and grime so we like to use what are called braided wire wheels and i'll give you a close-up on this but it's the same style of wire wheel but then what they do is they take all of those wires coming off and they braid them or twist them together and it makes a wire wheel that is much more durable and it will actually instead of just losing and flinging the wires off it actually just wears down and you get something that can do a lot more work for you in my opinion it's a lot safer and it lasts a lot longer so backtracking a bit but this is definitely the way to go when it's time to get in there and brush all of the rust and grime off of your metal floor pan moving away from that i want to talk about what you do after you have all that rust gone one of the products i really like to use is this concrete and metal prep this is a clean strip but i'll tell you what it really is it's just phosphoric acid and i know that sounds scary but phosphoric acid is actually an ingredient in coca-cola nuts right what this does is it gets in there and it converts uh iron oxide which is rust into a paintable surface if you don't do something like this and depending on the paint you use you're not going to get good adhesion and so as soon as that area gets wet again the rust will just pick up basically right where it left off so that's a bummer we like to use this especially if you're going to be using a product like this rust-oleum rusty metal primer to cover your floor pan however after a few years of using these two things in tandem i discovered one of my favorite products and that is a product called chassis saver and you'll have to forgive me because i spilled paint on the front of this but this is a really incredible paint it's not cheap it's about 110 a gallon one gallon is more than enough to do the floor pan on an entire 40-foot bus and this stuff is incredible it cures rock hard it seals in the metal in a way that none of this cute like rust-oleum stuff that you get at home depot can it's really intense it's an industrial product it's heavy duty if you get it on your skin the only way to remove it is time and that's like your skin needs to like shed but i love it i discovered this first when we were doing a restoration on a vintage crown bus and we were trying to preserve the original frame as best as possible didn't really have any rust on it and we wanted to keep it that way and so i was looking into options that were a little more advanced and professional than your typical rust-oleum and this is what i found it had great reviews and we've been using this for the past five years and i can't say enough good things about it what's different about this versus your home depot you know thirty dollars a gallon is that it wants to bond directly to uh rusty's surface it needs something to like bite into so if you hit it with something like this prep and etch product here it's actually going to prohibit the chassis saver from bonding as as well as it potentially could so that's something to be on the lookout for but the nice thing is if you use this product you can skip the step here of using the phosphoric acid after you abrade the surface and get the flaky rust off you can go straight to the chassis saver which is what i'm doing on my bus and you'll see in a second and you get great results you get to skip a step and you don't have to use the phosphoric acid which if you ever mess with this stuff it's not super dangerous but it smells awful it turns your bus into something that smells like a big pile of like gym socks i don't like it i got some chassis saver on my hands here so i'm going to wipe that off wow let's see i wore gloves even before anyway so the chassis saver is great stuff once you have the floor painted with the product of your choice of course recommending the chassis saver it's time to think about what your floor stack is going to look like and for us we like to use rigid foam board insulation topped with a high quality osb subfloor and this is going to be the start of a pretty big soapbox moment so if you need to go make popcorn get ready grab a drink go ahead make yourselves comfortable it's a semi-controversial opinion of mine but a lot of people get really obsessed with plugging all of the holes in their metal floor pan i get it it seems like the right thing to do and it feels good to do it so why not you know well i've got a story and then some products that hopefully will convince you that that's something you don't need to worry about in my old bus that i lived in one day i had a situation where the water inlet hose going into my bus had come loose and it flooded the interior of my bus with many gallons of water during the build out of my bus i had opted not to either weld up or otherwise seal all of the seat holes in my floor pan i did that for a couple of reasons but the biggest one was being lazy and and believing that it didn't really matter it's underneath the bus so i was very pleased when all the water that was leaking into my bus was able to find a way out of the floor because i left those holes uncovered if i hadn't essentially i would have turned my bus into a giant bathtub and the whole you know subfloor would have just filled with water that's reason number one the next reason is a lot of folks will go in and they'll try to weld them shut um one time i was welding the the holes in a floor pan shut and while i was doing that a hot piece of slag from the hole fell through the floor and landed on one of the suspension airbags on the bus and it burned a hole through it so because of that i got to spend about 200 bucks this was on a client's bus i got to spend about 200 bucks and a few hours of an afternoon replacing one of the airbags on the suspension because of that hot slag burning a hole through the other drawback to welding the hole shut is that when you do that it looks great on top and you might paint it and do all that but unless you go underneath anywhere that you've welded not only do you have the weld which is just new bare steel but you probably burned off all of the undercoating around that so you need to go underneath and apply some type of undercoating or paint otherwise you've just introduced maybe 80 places where you can now get rust on bare steel the last thing to all of this is that if you do decide to insulate the floor of your bus and i would encourage everyone to do that if you use an insulation like this here this is designed to be buried submerged in dirt and mud and will not degrade so as a part of our flooring system we leave those holes because we're not worried about them since the next layer down is going to be foam board to varying degrees of thickness and gluing that foam board down will be our polyurethane adhesive so you have two things that are totally totally impervious and don't care about water sealing that all up so in my opinion plugging in the holes is a big waste of time but it makes people feel good that's not a good enough reason though for me to do it so anyways moving on we're not going to weld or plug the holes we're going to leave them and what comes next is our foam board insulation the next probably you know controversial thing that we do around here is we do not frame our subfloors and what i mean by that is we do not lay you know two by four sleeper joists or two by two sleeper joists down the floor and frame it out put insulation in that and then screw our subfloor to that we instead go directly from the metal floor pan to our foam board insulation to our osb subfloor we do that because it's totally unnecessary but also because if you do decide to put in those sleeper joists it creates a thermal bridge wood has an r value of about one per inch this has an r value of about five per inch so every place that you have a piece of wood in your floor that's touching the uninsulated metal floor pan and then your plywood subfloor you have a thermal conductor that is five times more efficient than the foam in there i made this mistake again on my it was my first bus but on the bus that i lived in for five years and i could actually go in with my laser thermometer and i could see where the sleeper joists were because in the winter time those portions of the floor were significantly colder now the foam that we use is called extruded polystyrene foam which is different than expanded polystyrene and that's an important difference expanded polystyrene is the little white foam balls that you'll see coolers made out of and things like that and also insulation extruded polystyrene is a totally different animal this has not only a better r value per inch but it's also much denser and has a higher compression compressive strength so we like to use foamilar which is an owens corning product formular 250. the 250 means that it has a 25 psi compression rating you can get it in the 150 and it goes all the way up to a thousand a thousand being 100 psi now a lot of people say well if you don't frame the floor you know going down the road won't all the weight on top cause the foam to compact and and you know won't you have low dip spot dips and things like that in your floor that's just not true this stuff is incredibly strong it's designed to be installed under concrete slabs so it's very very tough and you know we've been doing it this way now for i mean the only bus we framed was mine and that was my bad so we've been doing it this way for almost eight years now we've had no dips in low spots and no issues i'm a huge fan of doing it this way you eliminate the thermal bridging you save an entire step of framing out the floor and you save money on materials this product is fantastic it can be hard to find a lot of times you know for me if i'm uh designing a bus for somebody and they're gonna live in it full time especially in cold climates i say you want four inches so this is a four inch thick piece here um the hard part is lately because of you know the way the world is finding this has become very difficult so they do make it in other sizes we've got one inch here and we've got two inch here and because i want four inches in my bust i'm actually going to be doing two layers of two inch glued together it's a little bit of a pain in the butt but i literally cannot find this stuff in four inches anywhere this is just a piece i had laying around so that's the board that you want to use there's another foam board product on the market that does have a higher r value per inch than this so this has an r value of five per inch there's a product out there called poly iso or polyisocyanurate board which is oftentimes used in roofing it has an r value as high as seven per inch but there is a trick to that because that r value and this is the only installation i'm aware of that does that it actually goes down as the temperature decreases and it goes down so much that by the time you get to the point where the insulation in your floor is really going to matter it is at an r value that is actually lower than what this has so it starts at 7 but i think by around 30 or 35 degrees it's already below an r value of five per inch which is what this has so if you're doing your floor don't use the poly iso i know it's available and tempting but stick with the xps it really is the best product for that purpose so how do we make this floor stack you know well we glue it all down and we use loctite pl um this is just like their typical it says 3x but it's always said 3x i don't know three times what but this is what we use we buy it in the big tubes we use one tube per four by eight sheet per layer so we'll do one tube between the metal pan and the foam and then one tube between the foam and the plywood or in my case because i'm doing two layers of foam it'll be a tube between the metal and the foam a tube between the foam and the foam and a tube between the foam and the plywood or the osb in my case we use this over something like liquid nails because in my experience this holds better but it also cures a lot quicker if you look at you know the original liquid nails it has a cure time of like two weeks which is just not going to fly for us so what we'll do is we'll cut we'll pre-cut the piece we'll glue down the foam and the plywood and then we'll bag it so we'll put down a bunch of sandbags on top and we like to use about eight sandbags per four by eight foot sheet that we install the top layer of this flooring assembly and this is another one that might be controversial is going to be this and this is advantech osb engineered subfloor and i know a lot of people think that osb is garbage and i'm with them but if you've ever been around this advantech product you'd know that this is nothing like normal osb it's significantly denser i believe this stuff is around 80 pounds a sheet where normal three-quarter inch tongue and groove osb is going to be around 60 pounds a sheet the strands are packed tighter it looks different i mean if you look at the edge and i'll show you a close-up here the edge it just looks you can it's very obvious that this has more wood in it it's engineered to be a subfloor product it's incredibly strong i mean this is an offcut and it just does not flex nearly as much as osb does and we've started using this after years of using conventional plywood subfloor the plywood subfloor that we would get you know it is better than osb but my beef with it is that it would be cupped or bowed and the plywood that was you the wood that was used in the plywood was often times like a pine type wood that was really low density and it would have lots of voids in the laminations of the ply those voids mean weakness at worst when they're buried but when there's a void in the ply because of a knot hole or something and that's your top layer well if you're using a thin finished floor a lot of times like a vinyl floor or some of these roll floors that void will telegraph through and you'll actually see a little divot in the finished floor and that's totally not acceptable especially around here so i started looking into alternatives and this is what i found after talking with people who actually do find home building nobody is really using plywood for subfloors anymore because this product is so superior i know some of you are probably thinking yeah but what if it gets wet well anecdotally i use this in an addition on my house and i've had a pile of scrap wood in my backyard for the past year and some of it included this advantech subfloor material well after a year this includes going through winter being totally covered in snow and freezing and thawing and all of that it still looks the same it has not done the thing that typical osb does where it expands i'm sold it's a superior product it's every sheet is totally flat and uniform and has super high density which not only is good for holding fasteners and staying flat it's very good for giving you that solid feel underfoot as you walk across it so everyone's got an opinion but in my opinion there is no better subfloor material out there that's made of wood than this advantech product it is expensive it's right now about a hundred dollars a sheet um but you know this is the foundation of your bus build so it's a bad place to cheap out anyway i hope you're all still with me the goal of this was to show you some of the products that i'll be using in the rest of this video because i want you to know why we've chosen this and save you the hassle it's taken me years to find these products and determine that this is the optimum way to construct a subfloor in a schooly but i really stand by this method and i know some of it's controversial but until i run into somebody who has more experience who has done something a different way with better results i'm gonna say that this is just the best way to do it so just to recap we start with our wire brush floor if we're using the cheap rust-oleum primer which i don't necessarily recommend you want to treat it with phosphoric acid first if not go with the chassis saver you can go straight from your brushed rust to this once the chassis saver is dried you want to grab your loctite pl the foam board foamular 250 xps extruded polystyrene and a thickness of your choice use your pl to glue down the foam board and your pl to glue down your tongue and groove advantech three-quarter inch plywood subfloor or osb subfloor on top of the foam you put down your sandbags let that cure i like to let it cure for about a day and then move on to the next course so the next 4x8 or the next two 4x8 sheets once you're all done i highly highly recommend even though this this osb is very strong and durable and resistant to moisture grab a cheap exterior paint or primer and just go ahead and paint throw down some paint on the top of that subfloor it's going to not only protect it but you have to keep in mind that because the bottom of this subfloor is getting glued to the foam we're essentially making that airtight so as the humidity in the environment that you're in changes it's going to cause that wood which is always living and breathing even even when it is osb it can cause that wood to expand and contract in ways that might lead to cupping and we want to avoid that we're trying to get a nice flat floor so that's a quick overview of what you're about to see coming up in the video next step we're going to take our chassis saver we're going to go paint the floor of that bus and then as soon as that that's done we can get started actually building on the inside for the first time and that's a huge milestone in any point in the build so let's go paint this floor [Music] all right well it's been a day well a night and the chassis saver is dried and i love the way it turned out i'll bring in here and give you a peek at how good this is looking don't mind the footprints but we got great penetration the coat just soaked right in everywhere and i know you might be concerned about seeing all this gloss if the glue the pl is going to stick to it but we've done some tests and that stuff sticks phenomenally well to this chassis saver i'm not really sure why because it doesn't make sense but we're going to go ahead and get started putting in the subfloor since we're using two layers of this two inch foam board insulation for our subfloor that means we're going to have a step up right here and at the front four inches and the way i like to finish that off is by taking a piece of three quarter inch plywood which i have here and i went ahead and cut that to our four inch height and that's going to set right there i'm going to use self-tapping screws to attach it here and then on this side as well and that gives us a really good place for our foam board to butt up against i don't know if you can see this but it matches up totally flush and so then when the plywood our advantec osb subfloor goes down top of that we'll be able to screw it right into here so on this edge and the leading edge it has a nice solid bite and good adhesion and we're not just relying on the glue to hold that edge in place now for whenever there's a time where i'm attaching wood to metal there's one screw that i really love using and it comes in two different sizes and that are these text brand wood to metal self tapping screws they have a countersunk head and they're awesome i've seen people struggle with the wrong fasteners there is a another brand of these that you can get at loads and i forget it's like a green box they're garbage i don't know why they're so different they look the same but they're awful these are far and away the best and uh well we buy them the engine 7 16 size is great for attaching three quarter inch material to pretty much anything on the bus and then if you're going to be attaching thicker materials say like inch and a half stock um or that's pretty much it really they do have i think it's a two and three quarter inch long screw which is good we don't use nearly as many as those but these are awesome they go in easy and they hold really really well these guys right here [Music] now that we've got our threshold securely in place we're going to go ahead and pre-cut our pieces of foam and plywood for this course now depending on your bus and whether or not it has rear wheel wells uh and how far back it is from the back wall to those rear wheel wells you're going to want to be strategic about how you cut these pieces since i have three layers my first foam layer my second foam layer and the plywood on top i'm going to be doing everything i can to actually stagger these cuts so i don't have just a big stack of seams there i'm trying to keep this floor as flat as possible which is hard to do because the floor isn't flat to start with so my first sheet of foam is going to be a full four feet wide my next sheet of foam i think i'm going to go ahead and just rip in half so that i have a nice half stagger there and then my first sheet of plywood i think i'm gonna go ahead and have be maybe just shy of a full four feet so maybe you know three feet nine or eight inches something like that but what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna measure the full distance to make sure that whatever i do down here doesn't leave me with a really odd or tiny sliver up front so let's do that now on this bus because it's a conventional style bus and i've got this cockpit area i don't have enough distance under my gas and brake pedal to actually run the full four inches of insulation from the back wall all the way up to the doghouse cover so what i'm going to do instead is right here immediately to the rear of this front stairwell is where i'm going to have my step up and so what i'll do is from here back so this whole driver area back that will be four inches while everything from here forward is only going to get one inch of foam insulation it's the best i can do without opening up a can of worms and relocating brake pedals and gas pedals and you know really getting creative and kind of insane frankly with how i deal with the doghouse cover opening also if i were to do the four inches all the way to the front that would take four inches away of engine access here and having worked on these engines in a bus like this before i can tell you that you want to have as much access to this as possible so i'm going to do everything i can to actually preserve access to the engine right here so let's go ahead and take a measurement and we will pull from our back threshold there all the way up to here so i've got 19 feet 1 inch so because these sheets are four feet wide i'm going to be using five of them to get to my 19 feet and one inch and i've got about 11 inches to play with so what i'm gonna go ahead and do is cut let's say eight inches off of that first plywood sheet which means that when i get to the front here it'll be long by just a couple of inches let's see by about three inches and i'll be able to have that to work with to cut off up here so that looks pretty good maybe we'll cut seven inches off the back just to be extra safe so now we have a rough idea of what the widths or i guess lengths i don't know how we're talking about this but i'm calling it the widths of each piece should be we need to figure out how wide the bus is so we know how long to cut them one interesting thing about the thomas bus which i don't know if it's coming through in the camera or not is the floor is not flat all the way to the wall about an inch and a half off the wall there's a little bump up and so what that means is that our first layer of foam is actually going to be a little bit less wide than the second layer of foam and the subsequent layer of our plywood subfloor that goes on top of it another thing to consider is that when we go to drop these pieces in across the floor here they've got to be narrow enough to clear the chair rails on each side so we'll be cutting the pieces just shy of the actual width for the second and top layers that i'm cutting and that serves another function as well which is we actually don't want that plywood subfloor material to be physically in contact with the steel chair rails and that's for two reasons the first reason is that it is wood even though it is very stable and it can shrink and expand as the environmental conditions change so we want to make sure it has room to grow the second thing is we don't want that wood touching the steel because that's going to contribute to thermal bridging which is our number one enemy in this whole flooring system so we're going to end up with a slight gap on each side and that's actually going to be filled by spray foam when that phase of the build comes so i've went ahead and pulled my measurements for the dimensions that these pieces need to be for our bottom layer of foam our second layer of foam and then our top layer of subfloor and i'm going to go ahead and go outside and rip those pieces to size [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] pro tip when you're picking up this pl adhesive buy it in the big tubes these are 28 ounce tubes don't buy i don't know what they are but the regular kind of caulking gun size tubes it'll cost you a lot more money and take a lot longer and if you're at a place like home depot or whatever and you buy it by the case you can save a few bucks doing it that way too so any guitar players in the house this is a great exercise to help build your forearm strength [Music] [Music] oh hey we're in so i'm just going to go around the edges and clean up where some of this glue got smeared out so that it's not in the way when we come back in tomorrow i'm going to shoot some screws into our threshold in the back there and then i'm going to bring in a whole bunch of sandbags and put sandbags on everything that's got glue under it so it gets nice and flat and then tomorrow i'll do i think the next two pieces and the day after that i will go ahead and do the final piece before we get into the cockpit area well i think we got enough weight on here so let's just recap what we've got going on so we've got our first course of our foam board our second course of two inch foam board and then finally our advantech oriented strand board sub floor and yeah i've got literally about a ton of weight on this but you really got to use that much weight if you want this to sit flat and squeeze all of the adhesive in and maybe i go over killing the adhesive but in my view you can't use too much of that stuff a couple things i really want to point out while i'm in here you gotta stagger your seams if you don't stagger your seams any variations in the planes of your sheet goods are going to be magnified where they meet up and then when you go to lay in your finished flooring it's going to look like garbage i've seen people you know they will install the sheets sideways and then you have places it's like the four corners where you have four corners meeting up that's no good at all because when you go to lay your flooring across it you're asking your flooring to deal with that plane change where it might be crowned or dipped so tomorrow more of the same and we will just continue marching our way down we got about three more days left i want to let this stuff sit up for at least 24 hours before i come back in and start messing with it so we'll catch you tomorrow ah okay so we're back for day number two of our subfloor installation i went ahead and took all of the weights off of these front two sheets because we'll obviously be putting more stuff on top of them put them on the back and i already got this sheet cut but i'm about to cut my next sheet here of insulation my second layer and i wanted to bring you in and show you something that i did in my layout phase that you'll want to consider because it's going to make navigating these wheel wells easier for you and it's also going to make your floor a little stronger so let me bring in and show you what's going on so you remember a while back when i was going over my layout with you i grab my tape here i was talking about how you wanted to stagger your seams and then also arrange it so you don't end up with slivers anywhere and so an example of that so here we've got our second layer of insulation that's going to go down and this piece is actually going to go you know and get in between the wheel wells well you can see i've got one seam here so this piece here is t-shaped and this piece here is t-shaped that's really nice now if you're not careful though when you're making your layouts you might end up with a piece that is t-shaped on one side and on the other so it ends up being sort of h-shaped and so maybe you only have like a little like three-inch piece here and then like another three inch piece here and you have to cut out your wheel well around it and it's going to make a really weak piece of either wood or plot or insulation so if you look here my next piece keep in mind these are 48 inches wide so i'll be cutting out a notch there and then look where that 48 ends it ends right in line with my wheel well and i did that because if i started that second piece a little farther forward you see if my if that piece ended there i'd have like a little sliver right right in this area that would just be kind of floating in space and when you're working with this foam it would just break it would just flat out break another thing you want to watch out for at this phase you'll notice as we move up our measurements change so the next layer of foam is actually going to come out to it looks like just about 11 inches there whereas this piece you know it's on the nine inch mark and then our subfloor the actual uh plywood that we go on top of that that's probably going to be closer to 12. so the the width of these wheel wells you know it shrinks as you go up i just wanted to share that with you so if you can plan ahead when you start laying your floor in back there that'll make sure that you don't end up with odd cuts and slivers around your wheel wells as well that's a big pain in the butt you definitely want to avoid it [Music] [Music] that's it [Music] [Music] all right it's day number three last day of the subfloor install and uh everything's looking great i'm gonna pull you in and show you what's going on but our layers all laid flat overnight and the pl is cured up with you know about two thousand pounds of stuff on top and we're going to get this up we've got a wood threshold that's going in up front here and then i also have a little cutout that i'm making a framed opening for that goes around our fuel tank access panel it's really important that you leave that panel accessible because that's how you get to the sender which is in the fuel tank and relates the level of the fuel in a tank to the gauge up front and it's also going to give us access so that later on when we add the diesel heater to this bus we can tap right into the fuel tank there which is absolutely the best way to go no reason not to do it unless you accidentally build over that opening in the process of your conversion but hopefully you're watching this before you install your subfloor let me show you what's going on bring in down here okay so this is what we're going to be completing today the last pieces of insulation and we're going to be coming right up to this line here and taking that across and that's just right in front of our stairwell and so as you can see what i was talking about here this is our access panel that's the sender for the fuel tank and i actually cut this piece of foam a little bit short so that i wouldn't have to make an awkward cut out and so that my frame which i've got here this guy will just sit over that so the frame is the same thickness as our insulation and i put an extra lip on it i don't know just because it seemed like the right thing to do this will go in place here the subfloor will go on top of it i'm going to bring my subfloor up to about right here and leave a three-quarter inch reveal and that way my patch the panel that will go over this will have a nice lip to rest upon [Music] uh [Music] okay [Music] all right so we've got the last of our foam in and everything's looking awesome i've got my threshold piece here made up and that's ready to go and um with this box i want to show you what my plan is so i'm going to go ahead and grab a tape and i'm going to take my little lid here that i've made and get that on there nice just like i want it and then i'm going to grab a tape and i'm going to measure from there to this edge and there to this edge so i can index it front to back and then side to side i'm going to measure from this edge to the side of the bus here and i'm going to record those measurements on here and then i'm not going to cut the opening yet on this top last layer of plywood i'm actually going to glue the plywood down and then i'm going to use those measurements to locate this back where i want it and once i have this back where it should go i'm going to trace around it on the new sheet of plywood and then i'm going to set the depth on the bottom of my circular saw to three quarters of an inch i'm going to plunge cut the opening out i find it's easier to cut to the size of your patch or your panel than it is to try to fit the panel to an opening if that makes any sense at all so i've got this ready to go and then over here i've got my sheet cut hey look a roof race and i'm gonna go ahead and grab ben we'll glue this down i'm gonna fill this gap here with glue press that up and then once the sheet is down i'm going to screw into the top of it and i'll probably just put some sandbags or something to block this in or hold this up in place for now because eventually i'm going to have my one inch foam board down here in the driver's cockpit with my three-quarter inch plywood on top of that and that will capture it but for now i just need something to hold it in place so i'll get you set up and watch that go down [Music] okie doke so that just turned out fantastic and the whole floor is done it's glued in and laying flat tomorrow i'm going to come in and i'll make that plunge cut for my fuel tank access we'll get all these sandbags out of here and i'm going to go ahead and paint the top of this floor just to seal it all up and then our next project for a different time will be this front area looking great though well the day is tomorrow and i've already broken a sweat because i was getting the sandbags batteries and water jugs clamping this floor down out of here so i could cut my opening for my fuel tank access and we can throw a coat of primer on here to seal this floor up and i'm going to bring you in i just want to share with you how wonderfully this is all turning out i'm just chuffed take a look so here we are all the bags removed and it's just flat as can be and i can tell you i'm in the middle of laying wood floors in my 1908 house and i would die to have floors this flat anyway getting ready to cut that fuel tank access hole here and like i said i measured our distances off the wall there and into this seam so i had eight and a quarter off the wall four and a half off the seam lined up those edges and then i traced this whole thing i'm gonna grab the skill saw and i'm gonna set my depth of cut to this i'm going to make what's called a plunge cut and cut this out finish the corners with my multi-tool and i can remove this and already have my patch ready to go like i was saying it's easier in my opinion to cut a hole to fit your patch than to cut a patch to fit the hole i seen other folks doing this you know subfloor thing recently on youtube and you you gotta use the tongue and groove style plywood and minimize your number of seams oh my gosh you want it flat got to keep it flat all right let's make these cuts [Applause] [Music] so [Music] there we go well look at that accidentally got a little glue anyway nailed that opening though huh pretty pleased with that now let's see if our patch fits i hope it does oh boy that's a that's a very snug fit isn't it i'm going to trim that just as scotch but please please please oh i had to get the chisel out and pretend to be a carpenter to get the uh pl off but i think now let's see what we got here and once i push this down i don't think it's going anywhere look at that no lippage anywhere oh that's great hey let's clean up this mess and uh we'll grab our paint we'll sweep it out seal this thing up [Music] well another night has come and gone the primer i laid down has had a chance to dry and things just keep getting better around here i think this might be the nicest subfloor i've ever put down so there's that i picked a good time to do it i hope you enjoyed watching this video and you got something out of it i definitely learned a couple of things and had a good time sharing it with you if you like this kind of content make sure you like the video and subscribe and tune in every sunday where i drop a new video and follow it up with the live chat we'll answer all of your bus related and non-bus related questions thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] [Music] well now that we've got our door made and our bus is finally since the first time well who knows [Music] product showcase [Music] so [Music]

Channel: Chuck Cassady

Views: 134,386

Keywords:

Id: us4WejejFWE

Length: 50min 55sec (3055 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2022