Walk This Way

Today we have more exciting progress on the 453's roof.  The screws I ordered showed up, so I was able to install all of the saddles.

As I had hoped, the process went quickly and smoothly, although it would help to have a younger back.  Not much can be done about that, however.  

Yeah, I know those footprints are ugly, but I'll take care of them soon.  Anyway, all of the saddles were caulked in place and screwed down tightly.  And next it was time to put the running boards in place.  The goal here is to handle these 16' long boards without either ripping a hole in the canvas or hitting one of the light fixtures.  And it seems to have worked.

After some alignment, the running boards were nailed in place.  Notice how straight they are.  Next time I will start fastening them down with screws.  And I generally won't have to walk on the canvas any more.

I then started doing some more canvas painting, which I can do standing up straight.

You never know what dirty tricks people can play on you around here.  The paint is barely dry on my nice new canvas, and here some vandal has cut a big chunk out of it!

Of course, that's actually the hole for one of the roof vents.  It looks like this:

I spent some time wire-wheeling it.  That removes all the loose paint, but there's still a lot of tar.  I wonder if I could just put it in the big oven to melt the tar?

While we're here, notice that the ventilator has holes for about five times as many screws as are really necessary.  The drip rails on these cars are the same way.  Annoying, but that's the way it is.

Be that as it may, I managed to put a third coat of canvas paint on almost the entire roof, except the ends.

So things are going along well.

The only other person in the shop today was John, who is doing a thorough job on rebuilding both sides of the 306.  He has put in a tremendous amount of effort on this project.