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Old 06-05-2020, 11:50 AM   #1
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Ruster cross members advice needed!

Alright who has replaced crossmembers under their floor due to rust? Found out that a lot more are damaged than expected but I’m kiiiind if attached now.

INFO ON THE BUS:

2001 BLUEBIRD ALL-CANADIAN
8.3L CUMMINS
84 PASSENGER FLAT NOSED PUSHER
APPROX 280k KMS


I had the situation assessed and the guy is thinking it will cost close to $15k CAD to fix. I think this is excessive but he seems to think it’s accurate.

Basically what needs to happen is....

1. the floor sheet metal needs to be torn up
2. The crossmembers over the axles need to be taken out and replaced
3. Rusted exterior sheet metal needs to be replaced

The guy says that a sub-frame needs to be built inside so the frame doesn’t implode when the crossmembers and the other body metal are removed. Does that sound right? He mentioned that the sheet metal is “aircraft grade” and can’t use regular rivets, which I thought everyone did for changing out panels.

To me it seems like a pretty simple, albeit time-consuming project for a welder/fab guy. Am I insane?

I’m willing to spend a decent chunk of change to fix it, but not $15k. I know a lot of people are going to say: why don’t you just buy another bus, or a less rusty one?! I wish it was that easy. It took me like a year to find this one (looking for fairly specific), and have never seen another one. I looked all across the country (CANADA), during that time, I should mention. No areas of Canada are really safe from rust, FYI.

Thanks!
Andrew

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Old 06-05-2020, 02:02 PM   #2
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I am curious which cross members you aretalking about? Need pics to assess. Does a magnet stick to the sheet metal? If the sheet metal is aluminum than aluminum rivets is fine. If metal sticks means us steel so steel rivets should work.
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Old 06-05-2020, 02:30 PM   #3
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You should post some pictures of the rust damage so we can evaluate it, but $15,000 CAD (~$11,000 USD) is a high price (but not necessarily an unfair one). My bus had severe rust damage and I had to rebuild a large portion of it (an 8'x8' square area around the wheel wells) - check out my build thread for more details (here's a briefer summary of the floor rebuild).

The materials for my entire floor rebuild cost around $500 (all my figures are in USD, sorry). I don't have a good accounting of my hourly time on it, but I probably averaged around 4 hours a day between the middle of October and April so it might be in the vicinity of 500 hours. $50 an hour for a rebuild like this would probably be a good hourly rate to get - which would be $25,000.

A simpler build (without all the below-floor projecting stuff) would have taken a lot less than 500 hours, but you're also unlikely to find a pro that would do it for $50 an hour (tools, shop overhead, insurance etc. really increases the price of professional services). Best case scenario (just assuming you have the same sort of damage as me) is maybe 50 hours at $100 an hour so you'd be looking at a price of $5500 (with materials); if it just takes the person two weeks instead of one, now you're at about the $15,000 CAD price you quoted originally.

Unless you're fixing this rust yourself, I don't think this makes any financial sense at all. You could buy three or four running, rust-free buses for that kind of money.
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Old 06-05-2020, 02:34 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by veganbus View Post
The guy says that a sub-frame needs to be built inside so the frame doesn’t implode when the crossmembers and the other body metal are removed. Does that sound right? He mentioned that the sheet metal is “aircraft grade” and can’t use regular rivets, which I thought everyone did for changing out panels.
This is hilariously not right. I drove my bus around for weeks with the big 8'x'8 section around the wheel wells entirely removed. A bus body is largely a self-supporting tube that will not deform much even with large chunks of it removed.

The bus floor is just sheet metal, nothing "aircraft grade" about it. Sounds like the person is conning you. You would not want to be using rivets to repair the floor in any event.
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Old 06-05-2020, 03:58 PM   #5
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Sorry, they are the pieces under the floor that run from left to right. I don’t have the bus right now so pictures aren’t available. Also on mobile. I’ll get some!
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Old 06-05-2020, 04:00 PM   #6
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I appreciate the input. I’ll check yours out!
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Old 06-05-2020, 04:02 PM   #7
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Sorry maybe that wasn’t clear — that was referring to the exterior sheet metal, not the floor. His concern was having all that removed while also having the floor out
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Old 06-05-2020, 04:03 PM   #8
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Not sure why quoting the messages in my reply didn’t work. Sorry folks!
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Old 06-05-2020, 05:33 PM   #9
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Not sure why quoting the messages in my reply didn’t work. Sorry folks!
Hit the "Quote" button and not the "Quick Reply" button.
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Old 06-05-2020, 06:40 PM   #10
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Definitely need pictures to assess any level of structure.

But my first thought after reading all this is if you fix the floor before pulling the exterior skin you won't loose the shape of the bus...

I'm (only) guessing the floor and sub-frame are rusted completely out where they join the wall and the walls also rusted out partway up...
(This is why we need a lot of pix)

It can be a huge amount of labor to fix.
How much work are you willing to do yourself?
How much work can you do yourself?

See if it's possible to provide YOUR labor for some of the work needing to be done. For example you can remove the inner panels and insulation -- you don't need to pay a $100/hr welder to do that...

Is the bus absolutely stripped clean, ready for cutting and welding?
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Old 06-05-2020, 08:53 PM   #11
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Ya that’s probably what I did. My bad!
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Old 06-05-2020, 08:55 PM   #12
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I don't think you'd have a problem with the truck frame collapsing. If you take too much out of the body it could collapse. If I were in your dilemma I would use it as an excuse to buy some tools, and I would do it by section. Of course you'd need a place to work on it, and the time. A good summer project, if you like that sort of thing.
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Old 06-05-2020, 09:03 PM   #13
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Sorry maybe that wasn’t clear — that was referring to the exterior sheet metal, not the floor. His concern was having all that removed while also having the floor out
The exterior is sheet steel (usually, anyway - occasionally buses have aluminum skin but standard BB buses are steel) which isn't "aircraft grade" since they don't normally skin aircraft with steel. People use stainless steel rivets for them, but even if you had an aluminum skin you would just use aluminum rivets for it, no big deal.

You would never want to fly in an airplane that was riveted with the quality of a school bus' riveting. It sounds like they're trying to justify a really high price tag with some fancy talk.
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Old 06-05-2020, 09:18 PM   #14
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I don't think you'd have a problem with the truck frame collapsing. If you take too much out of the body it could collapse. If I were in your dilemma I would use it as an excuse to buy some tools, and I would do it by section. Of course you'd need a place to work on it, and the time. A good summer project, if you like that sort of thing.
Not that I ever want to get into destruction of this magnitude, but it would be fun to try an experiment (on a scrapper bus) and see how much floor you can actually remove with the rest of the body remaining fine. Obviously you can't remove the entire floor because then there would be nothing holding up the walls, but I would bet that as long as you leave one crossmember in the back resting on the chassis rails, you could remove the entire rest of the floor up to the floor section under the driver and the remainder of the body would still be self-supporting (although it might tear itself loose from the chassis if you drove it, since it would only be held in place by the two chassis tabs at the back).

When I first started on my floor repair, I was so worried about my bus collapsing on me that I was planning on building supporting walls underneath the two sides to hold the walls up while the floor was out. I had not planned on driving the bus at all during this, but I was forced to (along with a severed exhaust pipe) in order to rescue my bus from the guy I'd hired to do the rebuild. Not only did the bus not collapse with this 8x8' section removed (and it was actually fully disconnected from the wall for 12 feet along the driver's side), but the walls sprung up slightly (about 1/4" in the middle of the section) when freed from the floor.
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Old 06-07-2020, 09:42 AM   #15
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The exterior is sheet steel (usually, anyway - occasionally buses have aluminum skin but standard BB buses are steel) which isn't "aircraft grade" since they don't normally skin aircraft with steel. People use stainless steel rivets for them, but even if you had an aluminum skin you would just use aluminum rivets for it, no big deal.

You would never want to fly in an airplane that was riveted with the quality of a school bus' riveting. It sounds like they're trying to justify a really high price tag with some fancy talk.
I was kind of getting that impression, too.
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Old 06-07-2020, 09:43 AM   #16
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Originally Posted by musigenesis View Post
Not that I ever want to get into destruction of this magnitude, but it would be fun to try an experiment (on a scrapper bus) and see how much floor you can actually remove with the rest of the body remaining fine. Obviously you can't remove the entire floor because then there would be nothing holding up the walls, but I would bet that as long as you leave one crossmember in the back resting on the chassis rails, you could remove the entire rest of the floor up to the floor section under the driver and the remainder of the body would still be self-supporting (although it might tear itself loose from the chassis if you drove it, since it would only be held in place by the two chassis tabs at the back).

When I first started on my floor repair, I was so worried about my bus collapsing on me that I was planning on building supporting walls underneath the two sides to hold the walls up while the floor was out. I had not planned on driving the bus at all during this, but I was forced to (along with a severed exhaust pipe) in order to rescue my bus from the guy I'd hired to do the rebuild. Not only did the bus not collapse with this 8x8' section removed (and it was actually fully disconnected from the wall for 12 feet along the driver's side), but the walls sprung up slightly (about 1/4" in the middle of the section) when freed from the floor.
Haha I don't think I'd try that experiment...
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