After a grueling 13 hour day battling OSF, SunOS, Solaris, SCO,
CableTron, 3Com, and a nice power outage, I needed some mind candy, so I
worked on the '54.

        I bought some 6 ton (yeah, right) bottle jacks, and used them to
truss up the bus.  I then cut off the driver's side longitudinal rail and
cleaned most of the are up in preparation of welding the new one on.  This
doesn't seem like much of an accomplishment, but there are alot of welds,
and a lot of ragged metal to carefully cut thru.
        
        Now I'm trying to figure out how best to put the new ones in.  I
think they were designed as repair sections , and not a direct replacement
for the whole frame.  Where I'm running into a problem is how to mate the
frame piece with the rear torsion bar - round peg square beam story.  I'm
thinking of making a circular cut in the new piece so that it fits over the
torsion bar, and then weld it right up.  Haven't found anything to convince
me why I should do otherwise yet.  Any experience from the field is welcome
at this point...

        So next I have to finish cleaning up the mess around the torsion bar
and the front frame section, and I'm ready to weld.

Thom Fitzpatrick
thom@calweb.com - http://www.calweb.com/~thom
Keeper of the Barndoor Bus Web Page: http://www.calweb.com/~thom/barndoor.html