Hey Everyone!
My boyfriend and I have been contemplating purchasing a bus for over a year now and two weeks ago we finally took the plunge and purchased one. It is a 40ft 1996 Thomas Built Saf-T-Liner with a Diesel 6CTA-250 8.3 L Cummins engine and an MD3060 Allison transmission. It has 288,300 miles on it which is high but it seems to have been well maintained.
We bought it from a guy who had purchased it straight from the school district five years earlier with plans to convert it, but his real passion was boats and he got distracted. He had already taken the seats out and started his conversion, we have very different plans for our final conversion but as we are still saving money for that we will be doing a simpler conversion to start adding to what he has done. The school district kept a log of every repair and maintenance that was done during the entire life of the bus so it made us feel better about the high mileage.
It's pretty cold in BC right now and there isn't proper heating on the bus yet so we aren't able to live in it. It would probably be more practical to store it until spring but we really want to get back to Vancouver Island (where were from) and to do that we have to do enough work on the bus in the winter that it can be registered as an RV and we can get out of the small town we are currently living in.
Will post more updates soon, so grateful for all the helpful people and information on this forum!
-M
Just started working on blogging our progress, you can check it out if you like. There's also a link to our instagram for more updated photos.
West Coast Wanderers - Blog
https://www.instagram.com/west.coast.wanderers/?hl=en