Old skool lamination for the nation!

Yep after feasting our eyes upon Neil and Mandy Melliards (www.Prosign1.co.uk) late model Bay at this years VolksWorld Show we knew the bar for cool retro interiors had just got considerably higher. To be truthful, even after all the work we'd done to our interior on the Project2tone we'd drop it all just to be able to put our name to what they produced.

So with only that bus in mind we knew we wanted to go vintage. A difficult task indeed when you start searching for yellow surfaces available in this country. We loved the 'cracked Ice' available from Pastense in the US (www.pastense.com) but the brief on this bus is and has always been budget. A budget that by me re-covering old ground is rapidly going out of the window.

We got onto Formica (www.formica.co.uk) who amongst all their other designs, colours, textures and patterns can custom make any surface with any design you choose to give them. Tempted as we were to send off a copy of our latest 'Take me to your leader' teeshirt designs to them I quickly realized that the joke of a table top adorned with our editor Ivan's mug would quickly stop being funny, so we went for 'yellow grafix'

An 8ft x 4ft roll of which costs us £53

Those that have tried this job before will know it's the cutting and edging thats the hardest. We allowed several mm's overlap for error when cutting

Then snapped the joints until they broke away from each other. this gives you a rough edge to start working with

Both surfaces are then glues with contact adhesive and pressed together to form a firm bond

Allowing several hours for the bonded surface to be workable we then set about smoothing those rough edges

Several careful hours later we had arrived at our newly dressed work surfaces - we hope you like them. That does appear to be the problem with an ongoing restoration though. The more new or repaired stuff goes into the bus the more the tattier parts shout out to be next on the list for replacement. We are very definately getting ther though. For more technical articles on how to keep your bus ship shape, see our special issue 'Keeping your Bus Alive' and regular monthly issues of the printed magazine 'Camper&Bus'