It's Big! It's Blue! Now we gotta fix it up!
The particulars: 1978 GMC, body by Carpenter. Purchased in July 1999 from Western Bus Sales in Clackamas, OR (Jim Trigg). Chevy 351 gasoline engine, Allison turbo transmission (swapped from original tranny by Salem school district to get better highway speeds). Mileage down from Oregon to Sunnyvale CA, including those fun mountains on I-5, a consistent 7.5 mpg. Had transmission temperature sensor installed by bus yard; came equipped with tranny oil cooler.
Nose to tail, 24 feet. Back of driver's seat to rear door, 17 feet. Sheet metal work done (badly) by a Maaco in Portland, OR, and exterior paint done rather better than the sheet metal work, ditto.
Update March 2001-- after 18 months in storage, with periodic driving around the RV storage place, the paint job has peeled and flaked in dozens of places. It appears that Maaco did not prime, roughen, or possibly even WASH the bus before painting it. Grrr....
The layout is, of course, changing even as we speak, probably to a rear side bath. You won't be able to read the writing on the August 15 layouts, it's not you, it's Visio. The scale was such that when I saved the Visio drawings it blurred the lettering. Mea culpa. Will try better next time. :-)
Figured it out-- have to choose a SCALE when saving, the new layouts should be much more legible. We may change window layout on one side, so I'm not sure which stove-sink vs sink-stove layout will be the final one. I don't want a full-window over the stove, don't need any complications with lighting curtains on fire, etc! Plus I want to use the back as a splash guard in formica or tile. Note that the newer layouts propose sealing off the side lift door, though I want to keep the door itself for a combination of structural and future option reasons.
The back door will be our fire door. Thanks to someone on a bus page (or was it one of the books) who gave us the following tip: put a 2nd loop on the other side of your hasp on your back door. When you are in the bus, lock your hasp backwards to the 2nd loop so that no one can accidentally or purposefully lock your back door from the outside! Of course, you'll want to lock it from the inside when you are using the bus.
9/27/99 update: We have all the ceiling panels off except the one directly over the driver's seat. We don't want to take down the hydraulic motor for the bus door until we know if we're changing the door, since we don't feel good about getting it back installed and working again. The install of the motor was done after the ceiling, so we'd have to take down the motor before pulling that last panel. We'd also have to take down the driver's mirror and various misc hanging on the front wall, like the fan, the first aid kits, etc. Not yet. I need to catch up on pictures to reflect our progress. Been sufficiently worn out and grimy after the last few sessions to not feel like pulling out the camera-- now I know why there are so few sites with lots of construction pix!
We got one interior wall out over the last weekend or two, going through several wheels on the die grinder. That seatrail is welded onto the kickpanel on the bottom of the wall, and has to be cut out flush with the wall to get the top part of the interior wall panel out. Glad we're doing it-- the insulation was rather misaligned behind some panels, and quite filthy behind others. We'll do some caulking behind there before putting up our insulation and plywood. Other wall is this coming weekend's project. Any Bay Area busnuts want to come help skin out a small bus? You'll learn what not to do while helping us. :-) Well, it will be a bit better than that. :-) Send us mail, "bus@virtual.net", eh?
Update March 2001: After 14 months travelling on business, I returned home to stay (yay!) in December and we started working on the bus again in February, after discussions of whether or not we should keep it. I've written a couple of short articles about the decision process, and will post them here when I can get them to save decently in HTML mode, they're in .DOC format now and multi-column Word docs don't seem to go nicely into HMTL mode. We still hope to have an intercity coach conversion someday, but even a 6V92 with Turbo Allison will not get us more than 11 - 12 mpg, so we're not doing as badly as we thought with this bus. New pix coming soon-- directory made for them, not uploaded yet. (March 20, 2001)
