Best Home Yet

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Here is the white steering wheel and simple dash gages. The wood trim around the gages has been replaced with a nice stained wood that now goes all the way across the dashboard. The gauges are (top) fuel, oil pressure, water temp, ammeter. The big ones on the bottom are speedometer, and air pressure. I sure wish I had a tachometer. Someday I will figure out how to install one.

The seat has been replaced.

On the horn button, it reads, "Ross cam and lever steering".

The door is air actuated. You can see one of the push buttons just inside the steering wheel next to the heat vent.

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This is one control desk that was removed. It was located directly behind the driver's seat so all one had to do was turn the seat around and use the desk. There were a bunch of wires going to it. 110 and 12 volt as well. Now I have to figure out where to route all those wires.






These are the wires. They are 110 as well as 12 volt. Presently they are capped off and residing under the musical instrument closet. I am sure that they are lonely all by themselves in the dark. They just want to be useful.

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OOPS, It appears that I may have double posted the above post. Perhaps it will fix itself.

Time to move on to the next photos.

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HA HA, All I had to do was wait for a few seconds. OK, Let's move on.

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View of the front passenger side. One more metal tray to remove. It is over the wheel hump. It has been replaced with a dog bed, which you saw in an early pic. I'll get more into details of that later.

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Originally, there was a diesel generator installed in the rear of the bus. It was not there when I bought the bus.

A friend made a slide out tray on which I set the 4.0 Onan that I removed from the Dodge motorhome. There are wires already in that bin so I can hook up the gen. to the power panels.

I will have to mount one of the gasoline tanks from the Dodge, under the bus to feed the generator. Here are all the related photos of that.





Bendable exhaust





Generator gone.





Generator installed.





Where the generator lives.

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The cabinet you see in the foreground stayed, as well as the one directly across from it (out of view).

The bunk trays and mattress pads are gone. One of the first building projects we did was build a large closet area with drawers on the passenger's side and a big shelf on top.

You can see some of the bendable 1/2 inch insulation that we covered all the wheel humps with. We used two layers and glued them with a spray adhesive . Caution: use adequate ventilation.

Directly across the closet, we built a twin size bed frame with storage underneath. You'll see it later.

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A big mess was had by all!

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The bus and my little pickup truck.

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It was still cold when we started working on this project, so I was using those camp heaters that you see on the floor.

You can also see one of the removed bunk trays and the water tank. I moved the water tank to under the fridge.

Now to the wood/coal stove. I found it on craigslist. It was only $200 and it had never been used. What a deal! It was lined inside with firebrick. I tossed and turned with the idea of keeping it. It is real sweet.






Ultimately, I realized there was no room for it as I had to have room for my recording studio, which left nowhere for people to sit. So I wrote a song for it-Ode To Stove. Here are the lyrics.
Oh my wood stove
will soon be leaving.
There's just no room for it
when you think of a couch.
Yes, there will be people coming over here,
and they will want to sit down.
Well, there's only room
for one small person on the stove.

I sold the stove for $200.

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This is the front room work site.

On the right you can see the furnace I removed and sold. Some guy drove 200 miles to come and get it. I guess $50 was a good price.

On the left are two long curtains made of heavy material. I mounted them on tracks to isolate the bedroom which is in the middle of the bus. Had this been a totally empty bus when I bought it, I would have laid it out differently. I had to work around the existing structure.






The furnace is sitting on the last of the metal frames that supported all the car seats you saw earlier.

Towards the rear you see one of the five stacks of bendable insulation that were given to me by my friend Stanley. He got them from a factory he worked at.

They were used as packing material when they received shipments. He collected them for almost a year. He still has many more. Each piece is 2 feet by 2 1/2 feet.

It is made out of a spongy closed cell foam very similar to the wrapping around some soda bottles or fruit juice bottles, only a half inch thick.

Stanley is also the guitar player that I get together with weekly to play music and record. He has been playing for over forty years and has his own style.

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Back to the closet. You can see that the wheel hump has been insulated. I put a face frame (3/4 birch plywood) on the front.

The black area you see is where the hump ended and there was flat floor. I basically built a box and lined the inside with black trunk mat carpet. Once again, I used the spray adhesive for that.

Next comes the closet floor and a door for the shoe cubby. The side wall is also insulated with two layers of the Stanley insulation.

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This is the temporary electrical feed. I knew there were ghosts in this bus. Can you see it?

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Over the right front wheel hump, I built one of the dog beds out of 3/4 plywood. Underneath it is my clothes hamper.

All of the cabinets are put together with L brackets on the inside so you don't see any screws. I have gone through 200 of them now.

The ceramic tiles you see next to the bed are going on the kitchen and bathroom floor. I got a hundred of them for $80. Good price. I bought them from a friend.

I used grey trunk mat carpet on top of the dog bed and spray glued it on. The front of the dog bed makes a handy hand hold as you enter the front steps.






Another view.

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When I got this bus, there was already an area for the fridge to be housed. There was no fridge though.

So Shawn and I took some measurements and went to the Dodge motorhome that I am dismantling. Lo and behold, with just a minor adjustment, we got the fridge out of the motorhome and installed it into the bus.

What a chore that was! We had to remove the door frame from the Dodge just to get it out. It was a breeze to get it into the bus because of the back door. Now THAT is cool. How many motorhomes have a back door?

In this picture you see the bifold door that was for the bathroom, the fridge (gas and electric) and then the double bed. You're looking from the rear to the front. Oh, also the curtains I mentioned earlier are hung on their tracks.

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Hallway view of twin sized bed looking towards the rear. Again made from 3/4 inch birch ply and fastened with L brackets from the inside. Much storage underneath. The floor underneath is insulated with 3/4 inch stiff board insulation as well as the side wall.

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Another bed view. As I mentioned, there is insulation on the floor and on top of that, I put 1/2 inch plywood.

You can barely see the Stanley insulation on the wheel hump. At the foot of the bed is a wall. It is the fridge area wall.

The fridge sits high so there was room to put the water tank under there. It is too long to have it stick in the hallway so I cut a hole in that wall and ran it partially under the bed.

You will see a better picture of that. The bed frame sticks out into the hallway 8 inches but does not impede traffic because the closet across from it sticks in 6 inches.

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Now a twin bed. A view looking forward from the kitchen. On the left, part of the fridge, the curtain, then the bed. On the right some wires from the box. You can see that the wall has been insulated. It is now covered with the grey carpet.

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Here you can see where I cut that wall so I could stick the water tank under there as well as under the bed.

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There is lots of storage under the bed.