1980 Chevy bus

[Twigg]

Originally Posted by xalv36963

Im sick of typing. Belaboring my fingers by attempting to convice the internet that diesels are more reliable than old-school gassers is just silly. Of course they are.

It's been my experience that some Americans are a bit weird about diesel engines.

Not just my experience. The much lauded Land Rover Discovery was available all over the world, and snapped up by buyers.

There was ONE engine choice. A turbo-charged 5-cylinder BMW diesel engine, because everyone knows that it's about torque, not horse-power for that type of vehicle ...

... except in the US. In the US market it was offered with a V8 gas motor ... go figure.

[CH777]

Originally Posted by xalv36963

I was under the assumption that the thread was more of a "should i buy this" type, if the OP does own it already then yea converting it over isnt practical.

.................................................. .....................

Im sick of typing. Belaboring my fingers by attempting to convice the internet that ...................................

Cheers guys

Dont mean to offend anyone, just dont want anyone to be stuck on the side of the road because their house is powered by a 38 year old gasser.


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Yeah............U R RIGHT!...........
Best thing to do is buy a newer diesel and then.........SELL THAT OLD JUNK 366 gasser TO ME!

End of problem.

Cheers

[xalv36963]

Originally Posted by CH777

Yeah............U R RIGHT!...........
Best thing to do is buy a newer diesel and then.........SELL THAT OLD JUNK 366 gasser TO ME!

End of problem.

Cheers

Your quite welcome for being right, I do it all the time.

You made it easy for me though.



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[xalv36963]

"I like diesel. It's smart way to go I imagine. But I'm not super familiar with them"
- ch777 on a diff thread.

Guess were both right once and again.

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[CH777]

Originally Posted by xalv36963

Your quite welcome for being right, I do it all the time.

You made it easy for me though, being so profoundly wrong.

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Actually you are not right.

In reality you are just some jerk on a forum....with no brains or manners.... nothing special. Forums are full of em.

I should have ignored you right off the bat..........but unlike you, I have manners and try to give others a chance. Sometimes that's wasted effort such as in your case.

That changes now with you............ welcome to my ignore list.

OH....and have a nice day.

[xalv36963]

Ok kid. Have a nice day. If you cant take it, dont dish it out.

Still right, diesel busses are significantly more reliable than gassers.

I got beer to drink. Troll/ignore someone else with your passive agressive sarcasm - next time keep it out of potentially risk causing situations though eh?

What would happen if your crap opinion caused someone to buy a gas bus expecting all to be well than they break down in the middle of nowhere?

Tisk.

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[cadillackid]

Originally Posted by CH777

There ya go
Hope it all works out as you plan it too.


PS - I replaced my Holley with a Demon carb 2 years ago on my 82 K10 (with a 73 built Vette 350)...... truthfully.... it's about as good as TBI as far as mileage and starting in any weather. And very tunable ( is that a real word??? ) and NO COMPUTER.

a TUNED and Trimmed 4 barrel carb will be more efficient than any 2 barrel, and can easily be as efficient as TBI.. EXCEPT when elevation is concerned.. the TBI beats a carb in elevation changes as it is monitoring the O2 sensors..

I think im gonnas go buy an old gasser bus just because of all the gasser hate on this forum!
-Christopher

[john61ct]

Originally Posted by Twigg

It's been my experience that some Americans are a bit weird about diesel engines.

No, completely rational.

When you're buying used older units and looking for lowest cost per mile or per year in normal consumer usage, diesels are much much riskier in the US.

Mechanics charge a fortune for even regular maintenance, and many areas of the country you have to travel (tow!) 100's of miles just to find one willing to look at it.

Diesel only makes sense economically if you're towing many tons or burning up 30+K miles per year.

[Ronnie]

Just a quick note on tha. On my Dodge with cummins diesel, I had an injection pump fail in the middle of Oklahoma, miles from any town. I did get a tow to the little town of Sayre OK. The mechanics looked under the hood and said they knew nothing about injection pumps. They were real nice and ordered one for me, and next day it came and I showed them how to change one and set the timing. The cost of the tow and a new pump was $2000. Ouch. No charge for shop time or tools, although I had most of what I needed with me. Diesel repair is specailized and often you will need to go to a big truck shop for repairs on the road. Bad news if in the middle of nowhere. I do love my diesels, so do not get me wrong.

[cadillackid]

Originally Posted by john61ct

No, completely rational.

When you're buying used older units and looking for lowest cost per mile or per year in normal consumer usage, diesels are much much riskier in the US.

Mechanics charge a fortune for even regular maintenance, and many areas of the country you have to travel (tow!) 100's of miles just to find one willing to look at it.

Diesel only makes sense economically if you're towing many tons or burning up 30+K miles per year.

or you can work on it yourself, or its in a cut-a-way type bus where it can be serviced at a regular car/truck garage.

some of the parts are shared between my 444E engine and the ford powerstroke 7.3, when I need to replace something that is shared between the 2, the price is 1/2 what it is to get it fro ma heavy truck parts house..

unless you can find a good Local diesel truck shop, it is easy to get Gouged by the likes of the big name commercial truck repair centers. the cut-a-way style busses, many regular shops will work on.. in their eyes its a diesel pickup / van ..

I do also concur that the more miles you drive the more diesel makes sense.. I drive all over the country and several others do too.. but there are many here on the forum which stay parked 80% of the time, or their bus is a weekender RV that makes a couple vacation trips a year and the rest are rather short jaunts to the lake or in-state campground.. for those not running down white-lines, gasoline is probably a good bet.. it also seems to me gas engines take to being moth-balled more than diesels..

being that I came from the classic car world, in ohio many of us would put our cars up the first of november and may not get them out till april 1 (unless spring came early).. some years i was good and would go start the cars.. mamny years they sat the winter in the garage, and I came along in spring, poured a little gas down the carb and fired it right up.. that seems to be the norm for gassers.. diesels get finicky when they sit..
-Christopher

[CH777]

Originally Posted by cadillackid

I think im gonnas go buy an old gasser bus just because of all the gasser hate on this forum!
-Christopher

I'd like to have this 1980 bus and drop a built 350 or maybe a 454 in it ..headers, cherry bombs , nice cam lope. Hook it up to a big 5 speed manual.

Airbrush a full scene of Rat Fink drag racing a blown shorty bus down the sides.....Ole Rat Fink sticking out of the bus roof with his hand on the shifter banging gears, tires smoking, bloodshot eyes bugged out, tongue flapping in the breeze.

It would make a great cruise-in machine. Heck, it would make a great camper as well.

UH OH!..... I may be on a mission now.

[Coamack1]

I recently purchased a 1980 Chevrolet 55 passenger bus. It has a 350 in it, and before I even picked it up I was planning an engine swap. When I picked it up I filled the gas tank. The 350 pulled very well on the highway and back roads, was very quiet. Arriving home I topped off the fuel tank to prevent an air gap at the top of the tank while I worked on it. The math shows just under 9 miles per gallon. I have decided to keep the 350 until it wears or fails. I already have other engine options from other projects.

Also a local furniture distributor has 6 of the Chevrolet cube vans that run almost daily. Each of these trucks have over 300000 on the original drive trains . They have been well maintained and serviced as needed but no significant failures yet.

I have worked on class 8 trucks for 9 plus years. I understand the benefits of the diesel engine but a well tuned and maintained gas engine can be durable.

[CH777]

Originally Posted by Coamack1

I recently purchased a 1980 Chevrolet 55 passenger bus. It has a 350 in it,.............

I'm jealous.......Sounds like a good bus. Hopefully I can find something similar.

I'm on the hunt. I always preferred gas, but was open to a diesel at first, but have now decided it's gas or nothing.

Fast start and go (especially in cold weather), ease of fueling, the fact I know gas engines inside out, plus cheap & easy repairs, access to parts everywhere is what will work best for me.

And I'm not running 30K a year down the road. Likely go couple hundred miles a pop and do a lot of sitting between.

May the gods of gasser buses please bestow one upon me!
AMEN!

[CH777]

BTW ----

https://www.blue-bird.com/blue-bird/...-Full-100.aspx

Interesting how it comes full circle.

[Ronnie]

Make sure you post pictures of rat fink if you do it. Think it is a great idea, although campgrounds may just have a different opinion.

I have thought of building my engine even adding turbos, but I need long distance reliability, so keeping it mostly stock other then fuel injection. It does already have side pipes exiting just before the rear wheels, both sides of course. Still a bit of hot rodder in me...

[Ronnie]

Ch777, interesting article. Have to say it seems like the epa would like to really curtail diesel use. Kind of a bummer all new diesels need DEF, so another extra cost and hassle.

[cadillackid]

im on several bus forums online and people are talking favorably of bot hte new gasoline busses.. IC now has one out as well.. and the propane runners..

I had the perfect bus previously to the current 2 I have now.. it was a super-shorty. a bluebird 5 windiow full chassis 1986 GMC with a 454HD in it.. had factory rear A/C and I added custom dash A/C to it.. i did heads / cam / intake /carb and dual exhausts.. it ended up being a very dark time emotionally in my life and that bus sat in the garage for sometimes 18 months without being started.. I owned it from early 09 till late 15.. drove it only a handful of times even though all id ever dreamed of was having my own bus.. it then got damaged "beyone repair" as deemed by the insurance company when the shared garage facility was set on fire by 2 guys trying to start a chevelle.. that bus couldve been the perfect cruiser had i not been in such a dark time..

I vowed not to let that happen when the fire for some odd reason re-ignited my lifelong interest in school busses... so alas ive driven the bus i got in may 2016 and the second one in oct 2016 a collective over 30,000 miles to date....

id love to find another gasser chorty like that to build..
-Christopher

[Twigg]

This topic seemed to get a bit toxic, for reasons best known to those involved. This is a shame because it's just another discussion thread and there is no real reason that one person's opinion should be so unacceptable to another, and vice-versa.

So ... as for Blue Bird and international and their new gas options. Well at the moment they are just that, options with little indication of actual sales.

Regardless of what they might be offering, none of these engines have been tested in real service over the lifespan of a bus, so who knows how they will perform. In any event, they will not be available to us for 15 to 20 years, unless they are total pigs in which case we will be allowed to buy them in 10.

There are good reasons why almost every medium and heavy-duty truck has a diesel engine, and those reasons haven't yet gone away even if the EPA has made their operation in severe-duty conditions rather more marginal than they used to be.

Slow-revving engines with gobs of torque tend to be rather easier to build than do similar gas engines, which tend to be high-revving with rather less torque. This means that to haul heavy loads at reasonable speeds, diesel is the fuel to use, and it has been for a very long time. The economics of diesel are artificially constrained by government taxation policy, not by engine characteristics.

Even though a couple of manufacturers have muddied the pond with gas offerings, the future seems to be trending electric, with big trials going on all over the place. These trials are expensive, but costs would fall considerably when those buses become production offerings.

For school bus duty they make perfect sense. The average daily mileage of a school bus in the US is 67 miles per day ... and only 175 days per year. That hurts diesels, hurts gas engines less, and hurt electric motors not at all. Give them a range of 120 miles and get the price down under $150k and they will sell by the thousand, given that the running costs are tiny. Buy it, drive it, scrap it when it is 40 years old. Maybe replace a battery or two, and a few bearings along the way.

Just my polite 2c

[CH777]

Originally Posted by Ronnie

Ch777, interesting article. Have to say it seems like the epa would like to really curtail diesel use. Kind of a bummer all new diesels need DEF, so another extra cost and hassle.

After reading the post by "Coamack1", I realized I'd forgotten the gas engine perks of being so much quieter, smoother & better smelling.

And the article is very interesting. The V10 Ford is looking good!

I'm looking into what it takes to swap a gasser out of a 88-95 GM truck (best TBI) into a diesel. Looking pretty easy so far. Might be the way to get a nice body with the power train I want.

I'm sure there are folks out there that have done it.

The diesel body is easy to get.... the truck gas engine is easy to get. And I could sell off the diesel stuff afterward.

Make for a much lighter bus with a whole lot less gadgets bolted to it.

I have the tools, a big motor puller (teepee type), the know how and the place ( I can park multiple buses outside my garages). I've swapped so many power plants in my life I've lost count.

And thankfully I live in Ohio where you are pretty much free to "customize" as one wishes without heavy government regs and inspections and such.

What do you think of that idea?

[CH777]

Originally Posted by cadillackid

im on several bus forums online and people are talking favorably of bot hte new gasoline busses.. IC now has one out as well.. and the propane runners..

I had the perfect bus previously to the current 2 I have now.. it was a super-shorty. a bluebird 5 windiow full chassis 1986 GMC with a 454HD in it.. had factory rear A/C and I added custom dash A/C to it.. i did heads / cam / intake /carb and dual exhausts.. it ended up being a very dark time emotionally in my life and that bus sat in the garage for sometimes 18 months without being started.. I owned it from early 09 till late 15.. drove it only a handful of times even though all id ever dreamed of was having my own bus.. it then got damaged "beyone repair" as deemed by the insurance company when the shared garage facility was set on fire by 2 guys trying to start a chevelle.. that bus couldve been the perfect cruiser had i not been in such a dark time..

I vowed not to let that happen when the fire for some odd reason re-ignited my lifelong interest in school busses... so alas ive driven the bus i got in may 2016 and the second one in oct 2016 a collective over 30,000 miles to date....

id love to find another gasser chorty like that to build..
-Christopher

Wow bummer about the bus!

Hope you find another one.

Seems all my stuff gets bought in the north suburbs or just east of Columbus out toward the drag strip. Lots of gear heads up that way.

If you run across one you don't want.....let me know. I may want it.