In addition to our bus painting project, we also needed to replace our VW bus window seals. The old seals were dry rotted – any time it rained or we washed the bus, we’d end up with black streaks down the side from the old rubber seals. We also had a couple red streaks down the side from rust under the old seals, when we first bought the bus Kyle used cleaner wax to remove those.Since the old seals were junk, Kyle cut them to remove the windows. Removing the windows was easy!

We did find some surface rust, especially in the rear windows, but it wasn’t “cancer,” so it was treatable.

Kyle cleaned up the window frames with TSP, then treated the rust with the Prep and Primer shown below.

Here’s a before and after of the rust treatment.

The only real hiccup in this process was the vent wing window. Apparently this is pretty common, but the rust in the window frame itself was beyond repair. Neither of us wanted to lose our only source of moving air in the rear of the bus, but the cost of replacing the vent wing frame was prohibitive, and we had a friend who had a spare solid window laying around.

For re-installing the windows, we followed the same steps that we posted about here, using paracord soaked in Simple Green to coax the seal into hugging the window frame.

This worked great with all the original windows, but when we got to our replacement window, we couldn’t get it to budge. We eventually gave up. We ended up driving the bus for several weeks without that last window installed – we even went to a car show and got a photo of the bus in the local paper missing a window. Eventually we called in reinforcements, and we learned that the tempered glass is nearly impossible to break. A million thanks to Snoopy for his help kicking that window into place, we never would have gotten it with just the two of us.

Post script: two months later, Kyle found some sliding windows on Craigslist so we got to experience the joy of removing and reinstalling the windows again!