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…

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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!

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

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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.

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