Last Updated: 19/12/2019

Here we go again

Déjà vu… Yep start again from zero. Good thing that we got experience now, so it shouldn’t take long before we are ready for the next stage. The seats got to come out, follow by the toilet and the air conditioning ducts… Now as far as a new name, I actually decide to keep Luigi “Gigi” alive. So the name will stay the same.

This time I got a friend to help me out… (while I’m taking pictures 😁) Having previous experience and far more important, no underfloor nuts to deal with, made this job a piece of cake. In the previous coach it took three days and two people just to undo the nuts..

Less than half an hour and the left bank of seat was gone..

Then we decided to try a different approach to see if the job could be achieved even faster.. Remove all bolts first then remove all the seats at once. Will it be quicker?

Oh, yeah… It is definitely much quicker as you don’t lose time putting the tools down after every seat…

Once all the seat have been removed, it was time to concentrate on the toilet followed by the aircon ducts. Ari decided to pay a visit and supervise the job

I was trying to finish in one day but the toilet proved to be the safest place to be in the event of a collision… The toughest dunny I ever come across. A mixture of silicon, 4 mm aluminium, 16 mm plywood, Hi tensile screws, rivets, quick grip glue, vinyl and carpet…

That’s why in Chapter 1, I mentioned the fact that I was happy that the Austral had no toilet. It doesn’t add to any value to the project and it just takes more of your valuable time away and more crap to dump at the local tip (no pun intended  😉 )

By the next day the actual toilet seat was out (it was actually the easier part) but there is still so much stuff to remove before you get to the screws and rivets holding it all together. Still, extremely happy to see no rust or leakages in this area…

It will probably take another day to actually finish removing the lot from the inside. Then is just a matter to measure the floor and see if the old original plan still fit, or we need to modify it…

The last picture shows yesterday bolts and nuts recovered from the seats… 9.2 kg of metal that will be re-used when need it for the dining seats. It just makes sense to re-use these seat as they are very comfortable and already have the seat belts installed with the proper homologation stickers