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Chairs & Sub-floor (Part 2)

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(Sub-floor bit continues from Part 1, here.)

  So before I could finish up with the floor (to behind the captain’s chair), I had to place the seats to insure that they’d have supports under them.  You may recall that I said that I wanted to use some of the bus seats because they already had DOT approved seat-belt attachments.  And DOT approved seat belts, so that was another thing in their favor.

  But they also have a whole lot of padding on the back that we wouldn’t need, and would eat into the
available living space.  So, I went about taking off the padding and getting them down to the structural stuff.  I had some hopes that it would be really easy, as other people had described tearing the seats down being a simple matter of loosening the outer vinyl covering at the base and sliding it off, then unscrewing some plywood or metal from the frame and taking it and the affixed padding off.  Not so with our seats.

Ahh, the look and feel of safety!

  When they built our bus in 1995, Blue Bird meant for those seats to be super-safe and last.  So I found that the vinyl wasn’t just sort of stapled and sewn closed at the bottom of the back of the seat, but it was also glued.  In some places the glue had adhered to the padding.  In other places, the steel.  Thus, it didn’t so much slide as tear in taking it off.  There was indeed (as you can see in the photo) a nice steel panel in there that the padding was glued to, but it wasn’t screwed to the frame, it was welded.  So in order to get to taking the steel off, the padding had to be torn away, and then the grinding, beating with a 3# hammer or hammer and chisel, and prying with a bar could commence.

  I had three seats to do this with, and there were casualties.  My poor Makita angle-grinder lost some teeth on the gear-disc, and the ages-old Wonderbar lost out on both ends. But, to their credit, they did so on the last of the three chairs, and the hammer and chisel saved the day.

  By now, you’re probably asking why I bothered to take the sheets of steel out of the structural frame of the chairs if they were so much trouble?  The answer is that I wanted to use the area behind the seat as storage that would be accessed by lifting the seat back, and that the back of the seat with four legs would block half a window in the cabin of the bus if I left it full size.  Which meant that I still had work to do before I could figure out where to put the chair supports, because the seat with a lowered back could sit closer to the wall.
A clean frame ready to be shortened.

  After the procurement of a new angle grinder, I began surgery.  It was pretty simple in theory, just cut the ‘U’ frame above the existing join, remove the extra along the outside, then slide the top down over the inner square supports that come up from the seat’s main frame.  Easy!

  I’ve heard some of the skoolie guys say that cutting the metal on a skoolie is like getting a tattoo – you’re trepidatious about the first few cuts, but then you’re comfortable and almost itching to cut more.  Well, I was certainly trepidatious.  What if I cut too much?  But if I didn’t cut, nothing could proceed, so I went about the cutting.
Not perfect, but a good fit!
  After the initial cuts went well and the top came off, I figured my measures and took off the outside extra and refit things and … it looked fine!  Which got me to my first use of my MIG welder.
  So, I wire-wheeled things to get a good weld, clamped things up, and got ready to weld.   I learned how to weld using a stick welder, so the self-feeding aspect of the MIG was a little odd to get used to.  I have a little Lincoln 20 amp unit, and while I didn’t get my ‘sizzling egg’ sounds all the time, I got a decent weld in a fairly short time, and things proceeded apace.
All finished and in place!
  With the seat finished, I was able to set it in place and figure out where the supports should go under the plywood sub-floor.  Now, under this seat you might note the square steel plate on top of the felt.  This covers the sending unit in the fuel tank.  If anything ever goes wrong with the fuel gauge, I’ll need to get in there, so I had to plan for access there. Not a perfect place if you note the angled 12 gauge steel panel under the end of the seat.  But more on this later.
All the seats in proto-place!
  With the other two seats laid out in place, I was able to set the braces under them, and then set the insulation in.
And just like shiny magic it’s done!
  And with that done, it was a simple matter to put down two big sheets of plywood to cover it up.  Well, except for the 1″ wide steel rail that seats would attach to that runs about 12″ off the floor.  One of the problems that arose was when I cut a piece to fit perfectly all the way from side to side. As I was putting it in place, I found that that 1″ was enough to stop the angled piece from sliding down the wall and into shape.  Luckily, the 1/2″ plywood was fairly bendy and if I stood on it, I could get it to bend *just* enough that it would snap past the seat rail and into place.  
  And that put the basic floor down in place for all but the ‘bridge’ and bathroom.  More on those later …
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First Things First

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So, finally the bus arrived on September 19th of 2008.  The dealer we bought it from (Don Brown Bus Sales) not only delivered it for free, but also filled the tank before it left Herkimer to get to us.  They also replaced the starter since it wouldn’t get the bus going to make the trip.

The trip for the driver and the chase car was uneventful until they got to Buffalo and ended up on the West Side, down by the Peace Bridge.  Being that we were in the University Heights area, I had to talk them through the afternoon traffic and all the streets on the way over (which of course just built up my anticipation) until it arrived.

And here is #267 happily parked in our driveway.
 
The first view of the interior. (And the gearshift!)
 
And lots and lots of seats.  But look at the windows!

When you get a bus in New York State (at least) you have 14 days to make it not look like a School Bus.  Removing the flashing lights is relatively easy, but the swing-out sign is a bit harder.  Both leave holes in the steel ‘skin’ of the bus.  The next thing is, of course, the paint.

Now, I could have just done a very quick, single color paint job. But I didn’t.  We’d been talking about Steampunk stuff, and we had looked at lots of Pierce Arrows and Thomas Flyers (What, you don’t know about the Buffalo company that made the car that won the 1908 ‘Round The World’ race?), so we were going for something like this:

A prime example of a Thomas Flyer. Even in our color scheme.
  Now, if you’re painting a bus, you need to realize that there’s a whole LOT of outside. And that if you choose a really cool, dark color (like, oh, say … Black!) you’ll absolutely roast from the solar insulation.  So, in order to keep summertime temperatures down, we sent with Rustoleum Almond for the roof (it looks kind of like canvas), with the added benefit of HY-TECH Ceramic Insulating Paint Additive (as used by NASA!) to help cool things down in there.  And I have to admit, the ceramic ‘bubbles’ made a dramatic difference in lowering the interior temperature after I applied it.
  How do you paint the roof of a bus, you ask?  I used a roller with a long handle. And, of course, I wiped down as much of the exterior as I could with a big dust-mop that I soaked in mineral spirits to try and get rid of a lot of road grime.
And here’s rather flattering picture of the painting of the roof.

If you ever find yourself painting the rest of a bus, buy plenty of extra painter’s tape.  There are LOTS of things to mask off.  For instance, I went with painting the ‘rub rails’ brass, some between them and along the window rails a nice ‘Hammered Brown’, and the rest a nice ‘Hunter Green’.

And there are stages, and you have to keep it dry, all on a deadline …

Of course, that’s a lot of roller-time, and clean-up and fighting with the huge blue roof to keep the rain off.  But the end result came out well.

Pretty close to that Thomas Flyer, huh? (Don’t mind the holes, though.)

And that set up the basic paint for the outside.  I’d like to say that it still looks as good.  The Rustoleum has held up pretty well overall, but now, five years later, it definitely needs some touching up.  We’ll get to that in a later post when there’s warmer weather.

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In The Beginning …

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… we got a bus.

   Well, not just like it fell out of the sky.  A wonderful Steampunk craftsman, Jake Von Slatt documented how he built an RV out of a used school bus, my wife found it and showed it to me, and I thought, ‘hey, I could do that’.  I can do carpentry and plumbing and electrical and mechanical work, and I’ve always loved the idea of driving big vehicles (I drove my first bulldozer at five).
  So, I did what we always do when faced with a new project – we researched.  One of the best resources that I got was from the The School Bus Conversion Network where plenty of people owned school buses that had been retired from service and sold, becoming ‘Skoolies’.  I discovered that school buses are not all the same.  Different manufacturers have different building techniques.  Even within a manufacturer, there are many different options in terms of size and amenities.  And the bodies and engine/drive train/chassis are from different manufacturers as well.  It means that the bus that one person gets need not be much like what someone else gets, outside of the National School Bus Yellow and red and amber lights on the outside. This was 2008.
  By July of 2008, further research found a local dealer who had what looked to be a great bus, full size, front engine, used locally, with only 70,000 miles (with a diesel engine rated for a lifespan of 450,000-600,000 miles), but it got sold out from under our agent, and they weren’t going to have another like it for maybe another year.  We were a bit crestfallen, but kept looking.
  In August, we found a dealer in Herkimer, NY, who had a full size, front engine bus, with the same engine as the first (but 135,000 miles on it), but because it was from a different manufacturer, it had taller windows (which was another of the selling features on our getting a bus over factory-made RV, since we like to enjoy the scenery of travelling so much).
So official looking, but the high windows are evident.
  #267 had one more thing in it’s favor – it was a standard!
The gear shift is a plus, the dash left a little to be desired.
  Both my wife and I prefer standards, and they get better mileage and control than automatics.  And mileage can be a big deal.  Many modern factory-made RVs boast only 2-5 miles per gallon of diesel (and less for gasoline).  (As of our last trip in 2013, it’s looking like our bus gets 9-11 miles per gallon.)
  In October of 2008, #267 arrived and we started the conversion.  Due to many factors, not as much progress has been made, and this blog is going to be the place to document what will hopefully be the final ‘push’ to getting the whole project as close as can be to being finished.
  I’ll be documenting what I’m doing with the water system, the electrical system, the propane system, the air system (for horns/chimes, not air conditioning as of yet) and all the finishing work.  I’ll show the parts, give reviews and as much step-by-step as I can manage.  I’ll also go over what I’ve already done, and discuss a bit about travelling and camping by bus.
  Come along for the ride.