An Update on the Bus

It’s been a while and I know many people are wondering how the bus conversion is progressing. It’s slow going. But it’s going. Huge shout out to my brother-in-law, Ashley. He did the nasty work of grinding the heads off hundreds of floor bolts this past weekend.

Floor bolts? Oh, yeah. Our bus is a handicap bus. There are several advantages to converting a handicap bus to an RV. No wheel humps inside, the bus is slightly higher, fewer seats to remove and there’s an extra large side door. There are also disadvantages. Well, really just one disadvantage, but it’s a big one. The floor.

Because a handicap bus has to accommodate wheel chairs, those chairs have to be secured. This is done by using long steel strips – very thick and robust steel strips – that run the length of the bus. There are 8 of these across the width of the bus. The wheel chairs are secured to these steel strips using a locking mechanism.

The problem is, we want to insulate the floor so those strips had to go, along with the wood sub-floor. Every 4 inches along each strip is a shallow allen head bolt with a nut on the other side, under the bus. There are hundreds and hundreds of these bolts. Removing them with a wrench on one side and a an allen socket on the other was totally impractical. I devised a way to do it quickly and it’s finally done, thanks to Ashley.

But, I’ll save that whole floor rail fiasco for another post because we did shoot video along the way and I would like to make a how-to blog post out of that. You would be surprise how many people have this problem. Once I get that video edited, I’ll be sure to post it here. Anyway, the floor is out and a few other things have been done as well. Video coming soon.