Categories
Demolition

Week #2

How many days does it take to lock a skoolie?

It is the simplest things that seem to take the longest. Locking a skoolie with so many single pane windows may be a little redundant, but we want to make sure that when the bus is finished, people do not just walk off with our stuff.

Locking the Bus

School bus doors are made of glass inside a metal frame. Between the two doors is a rubber seal that closes off when the doors are shut. We had to figure out how to put a lock on them. Our doors have a small frame at the bottom where the lock would fit. We bought a very nice deadbolt lock for this purpose. To make it burglar proof, we made sheet metal supports for the lock as well. At first instance everything seemed fine. Holes were drilled, lock mounted…. but then it appeared the rubber center seal was too thick to put the receiving end on the other door and make the lock work! Since the bus is in storage and we don’t have many daylight hours to work with, the solution was postponed to day two.

On day two, the lock was taken off again. It was moved to the place it should be (drilling new holes in the door) so the mounting on the receiving door could start. Two broken drill bits later and not enough tools on hand to get the broken bits out of the door, the drill was about to embark on a 31ft direct flight through the rear exit. But…then the thought of having to explain the additional expense of a new drill to the CFO came to mind and thus we decided to just call it quits for the day.

On day three, the two broken bit parts were removed and the receiving end of the deadbolt was nicely mounted on the door. It looked awesome and very clean!!!

However, we discovered that since both doors swing out, there was too much gap between the door and the bottom frame when pulling on the locked door. Basically, you could pull the locked door back and undo the deadbolt by sticking your hand underneath the door and unlocking it…

What a waste of time, drill bits and money on a really nice lock! Sigh.

On day four, a different lock was ordered. Seeing the problems with the first lock, we decided to mount this new lock only once the bus was back in our driveway.

Other Work done at storage

Meanwhile, we kept working on cleaning up the wiring inside the bus. This is very tedious work but needs to be done since there are soooo many useless wires that will be in the way when we run our own electrical system. Each time we have to pull off a ceiling panel to follow where the wires go, we need to undo 120 screws. There are 11 panels in this bus so it is rather time-consuming work. Plus, as we learned last weekend, each time we cut a wire that we anticipate could be connected to the starting lockout we need to try to start the bus and move it ….

Even though our HOA frowns upon having an RV in the driveway multiple times a month, we decided to bring the bus home on Saturday to make it easier to put the newest lock on. This would also give an opportunity to drop off some insulation and ceiling panels that were removed throughout the week.

Weekend work at home

Day five of locksmithing was the winner. Having all the tools close by and a set of brand-new sharp drills may have been part of that. The doors look like Swiss cheese, but the lock is on, and our possessions are safe!

By end of day, all the cheese holes were filled. After that, R helped remove the last of the wheelchair rails.

Then we took out the last two ceiling panels which turned out to be a family affair. This left no one to take a picture of all of us with our hands in the air like we don’t care.

Meanwhile, Cindy spent 4 hours on both Saturday and Sunday removing decals/wording/adhesive from the back and right side of the bus. Slow but steady progress.

All in all, great progress this weekend. Let’s see what the coming week brings…

Categories
Demolition

Week #1

As soon as we made it home, we notified our homeowners association of our newest adventure and asked for grace (and a week) to get the bus stripped of all the school signage and lights so it would be legal for us to drive on the road without impersonating a schoolbus.

Sunday: Ivo started stripping the insides of the bus. The seats were mounted with bolts and nuts through the floor, so it took two people to remove them. One in the bus to un-ratchet the bolts and one under the bus to hold the nuts. It was a tight fit under the bus around engine parts and lines. So R jumped at the chance to help and get dirty in the process….

After that, we had to have a talk with the girls about safety gear and appropriate work attire.

Meanwhile, M and Cindy tackled the outside of the bus. All wording and signage had to be removed. Heat was the way to go. The hairdryer wasn’t strong enough, so Cindy pulled out the embossing gun. With heat and scrapers, we picked away at it. Slowly, oh so very slowly….

Sunday night we purchased a new, stronger heat gun and more scrapers.

Monday – Even though sitting on pins and needles Ivo had to wait until schoolwork was complete as well as his own day to day job to be finished to get his helper working again. They removed the last two benches as well the a/c ducts on both sides of the bus. In the end we also emptied the upper dash box in preparation for dismantling. While Cindy and M continued to pick away on the outside…

Tuesday: Removed rear heater.

Ivo disconnected the hoses closest to where they exit the bus. Instead of draining the entire heater of coolant liquid, he put a cork in the end of each hose and used a zip tie to put a Ziplock baggie around the end with the cork, then pulled the hoses out of the bus and looped the hose in order to have the front heater still working properly without losing too much coolant.

We took off the stop arm and solenoid, finished removing all trim pieces and dashboard and removed four of the wheelchair tracks with R. While under the bus, we also removed the heater starter wire from underneath.

At that time, it was discovered that the protective sheet metal under the AC units had come loose. That could have caused a serious accident on our trip! It took three bolts to fix it. Cindy removed the “School Bus” sign from the top rear of the bus and continued removing reflective tape along the side.

Wednesday:

We took safety arm motor off and reinstalled the tow hook afterwards. Removed two ceiling panels (that is a LOT of screws) in order to remove the front top compartment. Doing that revealed many unattached wires, so we cleaned all those up. Disconnected the flashers and consolidated all loose equipment. Later that evening Homeowners send approval for bus to stay through weekend.

Thursday:

Took the ceiling panels in the back off and figured out that the black box in the back is actually the AC control unit. Unfortunately, it will be in the way of the construction plans, so we tried to figure out how to put it in a different location or mount it differently.

R helped to get one more wheelchair track out but discovered one of the tracks had bolts that cannot be reached since they are over the AC vents. We will have to come up with an alternative solution to get that one out…

Cindy scraped the “School Bus” sign off the top front of the bus, as well as the handicap placards.

Friday:

We took a lot of wiring out of the back, as well as the flashers (that make people stop when the door opens) that have to be removed. After cleaning up from that, Ivo tried to start the bus and was met with dead silence…. oops…

Rest of the night was spent trying to correct the issue. In the end Ivo put all loose wire in one big wire nut connected to the ground, and the bus started. Will have to figure out at later date which the actual culprit wire is… The happiness of the fix did not last long though: once Ivo tried to put the bus in drive…. the bus still wouldn’t move! We concluded that the airbrakes were under a safety interlock as the emergency window alarms had been removed.

Saturday:

A nice full day to work on the bus. But that entire day was spent trouble shooting the airbrake problem. Meanwhile Cindy continued removing wording and reflective tape from the outside of bus. At the end of a very frustrating day, Ivo gave up and cleaned and vacuumed the entire bus to at least get the bus ready for storage. IF we could ever get it to move again… It was a very frustrating day, amongst issues losing the door of the electrical panel that was blown off by the wind. Now to find new hinges for that one…

Sunday:

Shopped for some tools while continuing to research how to release the airbrakes. Cindy spent the afternoon continuing to strip the sides of the bus. One side is completely stripped of the tape, but now we have to go back over it with an adhesive remover to scrape the last of the goop off.

By 4 pm, Ivo finally figured out the wiring issue, the air brakes released, and the bus was able to be move!! Yay!! The reflective tape was completely gone from the right side of the bus and the glue goop was cleaned off. By 5 pm, we decided to call it quits and take the bus to storage. What a first week! Did not get the flooring ripped up as we hoped but having a day job and maintaining the homeschooling schedule and activities does not leave many hours to work on the bus.

It was a long first week, but the process has started….
Categories
Beginning

The Why behind our bus

The reason we selected a 31ft pusher bus over all the other options

“Why did you go to California to pick up a school bus? There are school buses right here in Texas!” That is pretty much the most asked question we received when we told people about our trip. The answer to this question is not as straight forward as one might think…

We chose getting a school bus over buying an RV because we do our utmost best to live debt free. An RV for 5 is simply not in our budget. Having done all the numbers over and over again we figure that we can make a bus purchase and customizing it to our needs for less money (but yes, a whole lot more time and hard labor) than purchasing a new or used RV that meets our needs.

The process to get a school bus took two whole years of research. In which time the average used school bus price went up by almost $1000… Sure, one can still get a bus at auction for $500, but you get what you pay for. Buying a school bus like that, adding lots of time and money to turn it into a six wheel adventure only to have it break down at every corner may not be such a sound idea.

Doing a conversion surely is not for everyone. The thought of being on a school bus alone puts some people off. Since we homeschool and thus our kids do not ride on school busses, they have no aversion to them. I cannot speak from experience but there surely are some stories I have heard from people who have very bad memories about being on a school bus. And that could obviously influence an adventure like ours negatively right from the start.

If one does decide to try a conversion, the first step is to determine what type of school bus to look for. There are several questions you should ask yourself:

  • What do we want to use it for?  (In our case an RV conversion for a family of 5)
  • Where do we want to use it?      (State and National Parks Nationwide, weekend trips in Texas)
  • What do we want in the bus?     (5 sleeping spaces, kitchen, sitting area, shower and bathroom)
  • When do we want to use it?       (Year-round)
  • How do we want to use it?         (As a traveling, non-stationary bus)
  • What type of bus do we want?  (Flat nose, rear engine)

When we first started with the school bus idea, we were looking at a 40ft Dog-nose. The big All-American yellow school bus. Just awesome! Having grown up in a nation where school buses do not exist – this was the dream school bus! But it appeared not to be the right choice for us…

An RV conversion for a family of 5 leads to space requirements. So how large does a bus need to be to comfortably go camping and touring around the nation with three soon to be teenage girls? Well, 4300sqft would do nicely! But they don’t make buses of that size. A 40ft bus then. Sounds great, nice and roomy, but now question #2 “where do we want to use it” comes into play. If we look up the maximum length allowances for State and National Parks, you will see the recommendation is to stay between 27 and 30ft. There are not many 40ft places available in such parks. So now we are looking at a lot smaller bus. To circumnavigate some of the loss in length, we now (very unfortunately!) have to move away from all dog nose buses. The easy engine access of a dog nose just costs us too much length. Bummer. Plus this takes 95% of used school buses that are available in Texas out of the equation….

At the high end of the park limitations, we come to a 31ft bus. (Since skoolies are normally measured by windows, this means a 10-window bus) We laid out many different footprints to see if we can fit the answers to question 3 all in this length of bus. And we can. It will be a little tight, but if we think outside the box and make space optimization our goal, we can make it work.

We want to use the bus all year round. In Texas, that means in extreme heat and humidity. So we need insulation and a powerful air conditioning. Instead of buying an add-on airco, we looked for one that has existing airco (and heat) that is strong enough to cool this steel tube down. If after the drive we need to supplement air, we hopefully can do so with a little inventive wiring.

Using the skoolie as a traveling bus means that we need to look for something very special; six good tires and a good engine that will last. There are many discussions on the latter at skoolie.com. The opinions are all over the place, so we went with one we know: Caterpillar Engines. We know the Cat C7 has had some issues, but both of us have worked with Cat engines thus we went with this rugged no frills engine instead of the more advanced, but very technology and electronically sensitive Mercedes-knock off Detroit Diesel (DD) Engine. Texas heat and aging electronics is not a good combination. But only time will tell if we made the right choice.

A traveling bus also needs comfort for the driver and those sitting in the front part of the cabin. Buses are not known for their quietness, so we want an engine away from the driver’s seat. The options were either a dog nose (but we cancelled that one already) or a flat nose bus that does not have the engine right next to the driver. This automatically leads to the rear engine (pusher) bus.   

A bus engine has typically 160000-250000 miles on it when they are taken out of service. A low mileage is nice, but the main reason those low mileage buses are taken out is because the EPA improvements are too expensive to maintain them. Not something a family of 5 wants to deal with either. The average school bus can run 500000-700000 miles so getting a bus with 210000 miles on the clock is not that strange.

And then we finally get to the very first question we were asked. Why California??? Well, the answer is actually quite simple. Texas has a lot of humidity. Buses in the north deal with salted roads in the winter. Either way, those are a recipe for rust. And rust is not a great friend of vehicles made out of steel. Hence, we wanted a bus from the desert. Dirt can be washed off, rust cannot. Our bus actually came from Clark County, Nevada, but either way, it is a dry heat. So the bus has great airco but no rust.

Now add frequent flier miles, car rental credits and hotel points and we could make this trip for free! Until we started to drive it home and had to stop at the gas station with $4.15/Gallon Diesel…3 times….

There goes the budget….

Categories
Beginning

Now to get it home

Though we had made our decision by noon, we still had to go by a store to get basic supplies for the drive back, as well as the bank to get the cashier’s check. Once all of that was done, it was time to roll.

The auto mart offered to remove all the excess seats for us to save us having to dispose of them. We kept the front four for us girls to ride back in, and the back four for no reason at all.

First thing we did was clean. The seats were covered in desert dust. Since some of the windows were partially open there was sand everywhere.

It took some time and a roll of paper towels, but we got the seats clean enough to sit on for the ride home. The girls each got their own seat, so they set up their areas and snuggled in…

And of course, we couldn’t start off our trip without the song…

We hit the road about 3:30 pm from Calexico, California, and drove to Tucson, Arizona for our overnight. Along the way, we stopped to take our state sign pictures for both California and Arizona.

Friday was a long day of driving, from Tucson, Arizona, to Ft. Stockton, Texas. Along the way, the girls still had to keep up with their schoolwork. We stopped to see the World’s Largest Chili Pepper, a must see of course, we got some treats and visited the original border of Texas and Mexico.

We made it to Ft Stockton by 9 pm. Who knew driving 12 hours a day in a school bus could be so exhausting!

After a slow start on Saturday, we hit the road once more. Entertainment was provided by some amazing friends of ours that took the time to make the girls folders with word searches and activities. And we had an hourly Bus-Trivia to entertain us with.

We luckily missed the worst of the bad weather that came through the Friendswood area on Saturday. After dropping Cindy off at the airport to pick up the car and then the dog, we arrived home around 8pm. We were exhausted but ecstatic at the same time!

1500 miles, 2 1/2 days….let the conversion begin…..

Categories
Beginning

Gotcha Day

New Year = New Adventure!

After months of research on the internet, we determined we wanted a “pusher” (bus with the engine in the back) with a Caterpillar diesel engine (since both Cindy and Ivo had worked on those). Due to commitments back home, we had a very limited time frame to pick out a bus and drive it home.

Our final research took us to Calexico, California to an auto mart that specializes in bus sales. This place had PLENTY of buses to choose from.

The first bus we walked onto was not very encouraging….

Luckily not all buses were in that bad of a condition. This one was much better already. Even though we knew the seats would come out.

Eventually we test drove two busses – one with a Detroit Diesel (Mercedes) engine and one with the Cat engine we wanted. 

After several hours, two test drives, and lots of inspection in/under/ around the buses, our decision was made.

N had more fun with “Princessa” the dog, then having any interest in bus shopping.