Riveting place

Yesterday we moved and ended up here. Today Mike & I are going to tackle replacing some of the mild steel rivets that doofus put in the bus when he did the original conversion. It looks like he replaced a few of the stainless steel panels but ran out of SS rivets. So he just used mild steel rivets and kept on going. I'm sure that looked OK the day he did the job but its looking a bit rough now. Mike has a couple of air power riveters. I'd never even seen an air powered riveter until last night and he has two of them. He's also got a seriously well equipped bus shop, complete with an L10 Cummins that he pulled out of one of his two spare parts busses.

(later)
Friday morning Mike & I did the rivet job. That went surprisingly quickly. I have put pop rivets in with a hand rivetter and it is a tiresome process, particularly with SS rivets. The SS rivets are much harder to pop than a mild or aluminum rivet. But not so with the air gun - one squeeze and they are popped. So by noon all the rivets were done and we were looking for another project. Which turned out to be tearing down a comm tower that Mike had scrounged from a neighbour.

If it had been me I'd have been up the tower with a chunk of 3/8" rope around my waist and another one to lower the sections but Mike is quite a bit more focussed on safety. He had a complete climbing harness with safety lanyards and a work belt. We spent the afternoon tearing down the tower and hauled it home in time to have supper.

Yesterday we left Mike & Diane's place and headed west out the Florida panhandle. For the next couple of weeks we don't really have a destination but we wanted to put a few miles behind us over the weekend. Last night we holed up in a rest area just west of the FL/AL border. This morning we crossed Alabama - all 60 miles of it - and entered Mississippi. We found a nice state park outside Gautier where we are spending the night waiting for the Thousand Trails membership transfer office to open in the morning.