Schooled by a Skoolie: How many more subtitles will I need?

Ryan has the perfect observation for the whole Rowsdower adventure. “It is an awesome project, but I’m glad I’m not in charge”

Well I am in charge. Which is frightening on account of my inability to make simple decisions. Well most of the time. I did decide to buy a bus. I’ll amend that to: my inability to make smart decisions. After all, I am living in a city that I dislike doing a job that bores the bejesus out of me because I can’t just pick a direction and go.

Something about my anxiety in that. I try to make a change and then end up freezing. I’m a catch ladies. But I do have a bus.

With the roof up, the welding began as I raced time to try and get the bus closed back up before winter arrived. I fell rather short of that goal. I also still needed to grind the rust off the floors as I finished patching up the major holes. That is a slow process. Which I think will be my catchphrase from here on out.

The lift devices held quite well overnight. And the following morning I returned for more welding. There was a lot of welding. You may feel free to Insert my catchphrase here.

I had purchased around 30 lengths of square tube steel pipe. They fit perfectly into the hat channels and would become the new struts. All we had to do was hold them in place with a clamp and weld the pillars into the hat channels. A note, a hat channel sort of a U shaped beam of steel. They run vertically between the windows. We cut them, raised the roof and then inserted the new pipe into the U and welded it into place.

But we had forgotten exactly how to weld. The heat was too low and the wire speed too high. Explanation, mig welding runs a coil of wire through an electric current and uses that wire to melt two pieces of steel together. Basically you have a little gun shaped device that you use to direct the wire. My welder gives you two options, how fast you want the wire to feed, and how high you want the electric current. Simple and straightforward. Except we were having problems getting a good weld.

When it came down to welding, we were getting an intermittent connection and well it wasn’t working. We had the wire speed too high. That was our problem. Gary fixed us up and gave us a refresher. Thanks again Gary.

I got better at welding with this. Much better by the end. Turns out welding in full sunlight is a bitch, as the bright light makes your mask cut out, and really with the blast shield down how am I supposed to weld? But I got it done. Day after day when the weather was nice. I’d change into my bus uniform before leaving work and spend a few more hours making my way towards that goal.

After the uprights were all in place, I cut some angle iron(L-shaped steel) and welded that to the square tubes. They would give me a place to rivet the new walls into place.

Yeah, I welded a lot. And I’m still nowhere near finished. Next I need to get working on sealing up the Transition.

What is the Transition you ask? You know when we chopped the bus roof off and raised it 20 inches? Yeah, that time. Pretty cool huh? Anyhow, there is still that step-up that needs to be re-filled. Usually in the form of some fancy metal work. Les installed the rear hatch of an old suv into his bus Transcendence. And then welded sheet metal around it. I really wanted to do that myself. And I had two Transitions that needed to be filled! Squeee!

So we found a local auto junkyard. $2 each to get in. An hour of wandering, taking pictures and sizing up possible hatches, before we realized that we forgot our tools. Another roundtrip to the bus site. And then I bought myself the rear hatch back to a ‘74 Chevette. It was brown. It would be at home in Rowsdower(I was going to paint it, but a ‘74 Chevette, that just seems magical).

All I needed to do now was figure out how to get it into the gap, and plumb with the roof, on both sides of the transition. I had no clue how to do that, so I set it aside as it percolated in the back of my mind and got onto other work.

You know what a bus has a lot of? Aside from chewed gum and gross rubber mats. Windows.

There are a ton of ways to raise a bus roof. Two Nerds in a Bus chose to cut lower and retain the long rows of windows, as inefficient as they were. I went with Les’s aforementioned approach. But I still do like “having light and being able to see”. So I was going to be forced to fabricate some window frames myself. And install proper windows. After buying proper windows.

Not to worry, I had expected this outcome and was already thinking about it. I just needed to find some slick RV windows. And facebook was a bust.

It appears that America’s RV manufacturing industry was based around South Bend Indiana. And to my luck, there are several businesses that sell parts for RVs. I found one that I dearly wanted to visit, and I must say it was hella-cool. One day of wandering around the yard with my sister and Brigitte and I scored several windows, and a sweet stereo system. All on the cheap. Will need to return for water tanks and a door.

Once again, having the correct tools is important. I don’t usually have the correct tools. For this job I was facing making proper cuts using a freaking hand-held angle-grinder. I pride myself in my ability to adapt. And I also pride myself in my ability to bitch when my adaptations don’t pan out. Stupid angle grinder, is like performing delicate surgery with an icebreaker(the ship, not the opening salvo of a conversation, though that would have been about as effective, I’m just not a man who likes talking, so I’d rather use the ship).

I was happy with my work on the window frames. For a couple of days. Then I took a better look and realized that I might not have been quite as level as I had first thought. Well shit. But the windows fit perfectly in them and I can always just call myself an eccentric artist type.

After that, the front Transition finally clicked in place in my mind and I made it so. AT least for the Chevette door. Still waiting for spring to return so that I can finish the job. Or have one of the people who doesn’t mind heights do it for me. I hate heights. Even sitting atop a 8' wide bus that is a mere 9.5’ off the ground makes me feel a bit wiggy.

Damn but it would be nice to be able to work on this in my own back yard. But douchey city ordinances and all that fun stuff you know. And I don’t have a back yard. I guess the latter plays more into it than the former, but if I did have a back yard, those assholes would have really screwed me over.

Jerks.

Schooled by a skoolie 3: Raise tha roof

With a few days of scrambling, I managed to find a place reasonably near by to store Rowsdower. I also got him insured, and picked up a temporary license.

The plywood was halfway removed when we moved the big guy. Taking an empty bus along the highway is a loud experience. Not rock-concert loud. But noisesome none the less. Finally got him installed in his new home.

And now I had a new problem to deal with. The lot didn’t seem to have any power. At least no jacks where I could plug in my tools. Not a worry for now. But it would be a issue for further on, for now we had cordless tools to keep slogging on with. Thanks be to Brigitte for picking up a selection!

Turns out, Rowsdower didn’t have rivets holding the inside panels. There were about 2 and a half million screws. Wide head squat little buggers. Most of which had been locked in place as long as the bolts in the seats. With my aged black and decker cordless drill I set out to remove some of those bad boys. And stripped the fuck out of more than a lot as the drill bit tore away the heads.

You need to put a load of pressure, else they strip. And I wasn’t able to get enough pressure in many cases. Fortunately I have a friend who is larger than me and better at that.

A word of caution for those of you interested in doing this, get yourself a cordless impact drill. That one tool makes a world of difference with intractable screws. Again, I wish I had known that early on. Life would have been far easier s we wouldn’t have had to cut out so many stripped screws. So. Many.

Having the right tools make a difference.

In the evenings I was watching videos and reading blog posts as I tried to wrap my mind around the next steps. Also I was trying to get a grasp on what tools I would need to pick up. And by that, I mean what welder.

I learned a lot from this lovable goof-ball. Many thanks to him.

With help though, we managed to get all of the ceiling panels down. It is amazing. A single screw with one half of an intact head(we cut half of a head off in order to break it, as it was stripped) is enough one of those panels attached to the ceiling. I ended up with somewhere around 10 pounds of screws when all the panels were out.

Finally got that last screw out. And the fucking thing was hanging by a wire.

After the panels were out, then came the insulation. Yes buses are insulated. With fiberglass battes. Wear long sleeves and a mask kids. You don’t want to get that shit on or in you.

Finally we moved onto the walls. Which was more of the same. More of the same. With the help of a wrecking crew we got the inside of the bus clear. And we were off towards the next step in the marathon!

Everyone seemed to want to learn how to weld. Who doesn’t? Summoning forth electricity that fuses metal to metal? You’re like a fekking wizard me boyo! How cool is that?

There was going to be a lot of welding. And I had neither a welder nor a source of electricity. On comes the most expensive period of bus-having to date. More so than even purchasing the freaking bus. After weeks of trying to figure out what I needed, watching videos and reading articles I settled on a Hobart 140 Mig for the welder. And these months later, I am happy with my purchase. I also picked up a Brute 8200 for my generator. I’ve already gone through 15 pounds of wire and Together they work like a charm.

Now I just needed to actually learn how to weld. Watching videos on Youtube is all good to get a sense of the theory, but nothing beats getting your hands on the project and actually doing a thing. Fortunately Gary, Brigitte's dad is an expert in metal and autobody work. And he was willing to share his knowledge. More so, he was willing to travel to the bus and and give more pointers and instruction.

My goal was to have the roof raise done, and the new sheet metal walls installed by Labor day weekend. Hah. It is the following March and the walls are only half installed at best. With hundreds of more holes to drill for the new batch of rivets.

The roofraise. I don’t think I’ve ever been this nervous in the week running up to anything. I thought I had my ducks in a row so to speak. I spent the days leading up to the raise working on patching the floor and grinding out rust. It just happened that the floors weren’t nearly as bad as I initiaully feared. There were holes around the wheel-wells but most of the rest of the steel was intact. Some of it was untouched by rust.

All I needed to do was get the holes covered. All of them. Up to and including the small buggers where the screws and bolts used to be. There were hundreds of the bastards. But with welder in hand I cobbled patches for the places where the Ohio winters ate away at the steel, and plugged the holes where the fasteners used to be. The former was far more interesting than the latter. But it all needs to be done.

I was also removing rivets. Sometimes with help and others alone. There were hundreds of them and they would all have to go before we were able to slot in the new sheet metal for the walls. I wanted as many out as possible before the roof was raised, when reaching them would be more difficult.

Finally the weekend of the raise arrived. I took the preceding friday off in order to get more work done. Ryan and Brigitte joined me and we spent the day pounding on rivets, at least until the steel order arrived. $1000 worth of steel tube and sheet metal, all to order.

Saturday rolled around and found us still working on rivets. Disheartening. Finally we said fuck it, let’s do this. Ryan crawled under the bus and put in some supports to keep the bus from shifting as we worked.

First thing we did was to install the guides. Les from the Mad Max Skoolie video has an entire channel devoted to his build. And I cripped a lot of notes from him. Firstly, I took his raise devices. 4 threaded rods with 2 bolts in the middle. The two bolts were separating a length of steel tubing with a heavy slab of sheet metal welded to the length. I’ll call them raisers, because you weld the slab to the frame of the bus, and then fit the rod inside the tubes. As you use the jacks to lift the roof, the raisers separate and you screw up the bolts to provide temporary support.

That description took all of the magic out of an ingenious device. Sorry Les.

With the guides installed, we made the cut. Cuts. Each of what had been the window frames had to be sawn in half, and then we had to cut along the roof itself. Easy right? Hah. I left that to the sawsall team of Ryan and Adam. They needed something to do, and I was about zonked.

Now the fun begins. Ryan and Brigitte are married, with a kid. So I had a rule that one of them had to remain outside of the bus at all times while we did the raise. So Brigitte took pictures as Ryan worked the jack. Take that sentence as you may.

The raise went like this. We took a length of 4”x4” timber and set it atop a hydraulic jack. Raised the roof a couple inches. Adjust the nuts on the devices, and then move to the other side of the bus and repeat. We were making fast progress. Great time. Should have worked. But for some reason the back half of the roof was rising a lot more quickly than the front.

God damn the cutting team. They missed a half inch of steel beam. And that was causing havoc. They made one last cut and the bus shifted again and settled back. Then, chastened we began the work anew. Two inches at a time, the temple roof ascended skywards. Just as the sun began to set.

It was a good day’s work.

I must say, that when the bus gets done, I am putting it on my resume. I’ve earned that.

Schooled by a skoolie 2: Rowsdower's revenge!

The first few visits were euphoric. I owned a bus. I was delighted that the bus was reasonably free of rust. The first bus I had looked at, the church one in the boonies, was wearing through. This one seemed to be solid and ready to go. All I needed to do was gut it and make it my own.

What do I plan to do with my bus?

In the real physical sense I want to transform it into an RV. Or tiny house. In the reality, all I needed to do was strip out all of the seats, pry up the floors, and remove the wall and ceiling panels, tear out the wiring and insulation. Then cut the roof off, raise it 20 inches and install new walls and transition roofs. After all that was complete, pimp the big guy out.

After all of that? I want to hit Burning man for my 40^th, in 2019. I even husband some dreams about quitting my job and writing full time while living in the bus. Like an adult.

Easy as eating pancakes.

Except that I had exactly zero skills or experience with this sort of project. The entire thing would be a learning experience. The entire thing.

I had been watching skoolie videos on youtube for a couple months. And had a general idea of what needed to be done. I wasn’t looking forward to drilling out the thousands of rivets. That was going to be time consuming and boring.

Step one was to pull out the seats. This should take a couple of hours, or so the youtube videos suggest. Just get yourself a angle-grinder and a pack of cutting discs and you are set! Youtube is a filthy liar and fuck youtube.

Here is the method we used. Take a wrench and secure the nut under the east, and then attach a ratchet to the head of the bolt. Then wiggle the ratchet back and forth loosening the pair. Slow and sure.

Most of the seats are rather useless. They only have legs on the aisle side, while the window side of the seat is propped on a ledge that runs on wall. Attached via bolts I might add. Rusty bolts that hadn’t moved since the bus was built back in 2004. With little room to move.

The first several visits involved me laying face down on the seats in awkward positions and forcing my ratchet one quarter turn at a time, losing purchase on the nut that I couldn’t see, swearing as I found a new grip and starting all over again. I got help at least one day and we managed to get half of the work done in about 4 hours. In mid summer. Inside a metal box. It was brutal.

Now all we had to do was remove the bolts that were attached to the floor. Huzzah! Half done!

The friend with whom Rowsdower was staying suggested that one of us climb under the bus and that we break the bolts one at a time using the ratchet and wrench method. Two seats took 2 hours of swearing ans sweating. At that rate just getting the seats out would take all freaking summer. I decided to go another tack and cut the bolts with an angle grinder instead. Just like the youtubers suggested!

This is loud and dirty. My clothes were eternally covered in acrid metal smoke. But a couple cool pics involving sprays of sparks were taken. Then you just grind out each and every bolt – 8 per seat. I managed to get all the seats cut out with a single 10 pack of harbor freight discs, with a couple to spare!

Remember your safety gear here. Protective glasses, ear plugs and a respirator. Yeah, and last but not least, water. Stay hydrated.

The cutting took forever, but at the same time moved along quite quickly compared to cranking each and every last bolt by hand. In just a couple sessions I had managed to remove the seats, and with the help of a few friends we stripped all the padding off and hauled the steel to the junk yard to be recycled(something that didn’t even cover the cost of renting a van).

Now we were onto the floors. You ever been in a school bus? You know that smell that they all have? Sit back and breathe deep and remember. That smell. It comes from the nasty rubber matting that covers the floors. Rubber that only becomes more noxious as it is defiled by load after load of children.

As a side note, if chewed gum were worth anything on the commodities market, Rowsdower would have paid for itself. Fucking gross kids.

That rubber is the first thing that needs to be pulled up.

Pulling the rubber is a fairly simple task. And went relatively quickly.

Under the rubber mats is a layer of plywood. Thick and gross, it has been fastened to the floor by screws. In Rowsdower’s case, those screws had all rusted and the plywood would need to be pried up with brute force.

Amongst the tools I picked up when starting this project was a 18 inch flat pry bar. I figured it would be good, and work well with the standard crow-bar that was already in my possession. I was wrong. Tearing out the plywood was probably the most exhausting job on the bus to date. Doing so took hours of back-breaking labor as you leaned over a pry-bar and tried to slide it underneath the plywood. To do this, you first needed to find a crack. And after that, if you were lucky, the plywood wouldn’t splinter.

In the end I went out and bought a 36” bar. It made a world of difference! But I had half of the floors removed by that point. So, fuck me for being a dumbass and not doing that sooner!

As I pulled up more of the flooring my heart began to sink. There were large holes eaten through the steel shell around the rear tires. Holds large enough to slip a small child through. This just added hours upon hours to the job. The bus giveth and the bus taketh away.

Interlude.

Nutters out there often worry about the Federal government going about and taking their rights away. I think that’s bullshit. The feds have better things to worry about than what you do in your spare time. Unless what you do is to plan terrorist attacks, then they might pay attention. But if you want to work on cars in your back yards, it is the local folks whom you need to worry about. The assholes who sit in county boards and in city hall. They forge the regulations that directly affect your life in a very real and daily basis. And they are strict.

Turns out my friend got a letter in the mail, and Rowsdower’s fat ass had to be moved. Else fines were going to be levied. This freaked my friend out. And it sent me into a spiral of depression and anxiety. As stressful as the project was, it was also a lot of fun and extremely challenging. I was doing something interesting for the first time in years.

Nobody else in my circle was able to host it, except my folks, and they live 2 hours away. The bus is a time consuming project and I was largely doing the labor after my day job, not to mention getting help from friends who wouldn’t be nearly as willing with a 4 hour round trip drive.

I was afraid I would be forced to sell my bus.

Schooled by a skoolie. Part the first.

I came across a video on youtube where a dude converted a bus into an RV, and I fell in love with the idea. With a couple of friends sold on the taking a bus and converting it into an RV for our roadtrip in 2019. (I am the wrong kind of stupid) I began searching for a bus. Yeah, I had to talk other people into this project, as I was already well over my head. More on that later.

I strolled about the interwebs for months trying to land a proper bus with the features I wanted. Flat-nose, rear-engine, 40’ long. There are always a ton of buses available, but most of them don’t really fall into my price-range of super-cheap, while not being about to shake apart in a light breeze.

Because I am either dumb or delusional in my belief that I can find both good and cheap.

I had a list of sites that I checked daily and I began to get really antsy and anxious. There were a couple at a place out in Maryland. I could buy one, take a flight and drive it back through DC traffic the 20 hours across country. Man that sounds like a bad idea. I ended up on facebook market-place as the days ticked by. Desperately combing the ads for a bus that would fit the bill. Facebook marketplace, insert Mos Eisly Cantina reference here. It fits.

But luck was with me, I came across a bus with the features I wanted. And in my price-range. A big red monstrosity that had once been a church bus. And the owner was a mere hour to the north, and had intended to build a skoolie himself and his family. That fell apart and he was now selling, but only after he had put in some of the basic work. Huzzah. I made an appointment for the following Sunday.

He was cash only, as are most of the denizens of facebook so I stopped at the bank and withdrew the cash when we were on our way to comic-con. And then spent the rest of the day weaving through rivers of strangers with one hand in my pocket as my shoulders cramped and my mind was wrapped in a gauze of paranoia. It was a long day.

The following sunday, in the company of a couple friends, we ventured north to take a look at the first real lead in our exciting new world! I was going to get a bus. Maybe. Mostly I was worried that I was going to be robbed and then get Ned Beatty-ed. I don’t have an opinion about the relative attractiveness of my mouth and to this day I am perfectly content to remain in blind ignorance about what the general populace might think.

The bus made me uncomfortable. The breaks were odd, the engine was leaking oil, the front step had rusted out and he had cut all of the legs off the bus seats, leaving the feet that would still need to be removed. We gave it a test drive and told him that I’d think on it. I thought it made me uncomfortable and I would pass.

He sold the bus to some other taker. Good luck to both of them, but I was back where I started. Then I found an auction site for local governments. Hot damn! And they had whole load of buses. All over the country! I bid on one in Eugene Oregon, all my features, and no rust. I was already cobbling together plans to fly out and drive it back. I have a friend who lives in Eugene, I’d like to drop by and see her. Fortunately, as the much shorter Maryland trek would have been an endurance job, the Eugene bus quickly taken away by aggressive bidders.

I ended up buying a bus from a school district in Toledo Ohio, some 3 hours drive from my home. I put in my bid and my nerves grew more and more strained as the countdown ticked closer to zero. How am I going to get this thing? I need a ride over. Do I have to insure it(yes, theoretically, but finding bus insurance is insanely difficult for individuals)? What would happen if I got stopped by the police, as I don’t have a special driver’s license? Did I need a special driver’s license just to drive an empty school bus across state?

I won the auction. $1500. I was already stewing in anxiety. Where was I going to keep this thing? I had already named it. Rowsdower, after Canada’s greatest action hero. I set to trying to work out the details.

Shit. I just bought a bus.

Late June and the weather was a humid 90 degrees, a good day to drive across state. Fuck the Midwest. But with paperwork in hand I set off with a friend across state to go and see my bus for the first time and bring it home. Like a proud, frightened nimrod who makes poor decisions. Like myself.

Rowsdower was in fantastic shape and sitting down in the driver’s seat made me feel excited as I imagined the possibilities.

Buying the bus was a learning experience. Firstly I learned that my bus could hit 70 on an open highway. Secondly I learned how to drive a bus. Did my bus have air-conditioning? That was my first question. And yes it did, when you opened the windows and got onto the highway. More importantly, did my bus have cruise control? I forgot to ask that. The answer turned out to be yes, I discovered on my own a month later. Hey, looking over your shoulder through the rear window? Like you do when driving a normal car, well that isn’t feasible with a bus. You stick to the mirrors buddy and you’re gonna like it.

The drive back was long and challenging. I tried to keep behind semi-trucks as Rowsdower plodded along the highways. That way I was able to keep a constant pace, and maybe even draft a little and ease up on the fuel consumption. What seemed like a week later, we finally got back into town just in time for rush hour traffic.

Another friend had offered to store the bus on his property north of town. He was in a residential neighborhood, but off the beaten path. I had never been there, but the friend who had gone on the Toledo adventure with me, he knew where it was.

Mostly.

We passed the driveway. I learned something new, backing up a school bus in a quiet suburb is not easy. It is very hard. Especially for yours truly. But alas, Rowsdower was safely ensconced in his new home! I had accomplished a major feat and achieved a goal.  And the rest of the night was mine to relax. Soon the deconstruction would begin.