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.