Hey everyone! I just wanted to introduce myself. I have been lurking on this forum for a few months researching busses. Yesterday I completed my maiden voyage and it seemed to go really well. I live in Ohio and picked up the bus in Utah last Thursday. We left Utah Friday and finished our transit Sunday. I got a 96-hour transit permit which cost me a whopping $2.50 to get home. I contacted Kelly Newsome (Allstate insurance) in Florida and she hooked me up with a local insurance agent. I highly recommend contacting her to work with an agent in your home state. It took less than an hour to get insurance, and I’m paying about $60 a month.
The bus I picked up is a 40ft 2003 Bluebird All American, with a rear engine Cummins 8.3L ISC (315 HP version) and a MD3066R. It’s the 77 inch roof model with a couple underbody storage compartments too. It ticked off all the things I wanted in a bus other than engine driven air conditioning, but I plan on adding that later. I got it for $3,500 from a relatively small school district. Although it was from Northern Utah, with the school district being small they took really good care of the small fleet they had. Very minimal rust, but a couple patches here and there. The worst bits of rust are on the stairs and on the rear engine flap. We’ll see how it looks after I tear the old floor out, but overall I’m pretty surprised with how clean it is for being a 17 year old bus from northern Utah.
I bought the bus sight unseen (huge gamble on my part), but did call and talk to the driver who was responsible for that specific bus, and she assured me it was a very capable bus – She was right. This thing can handle hills like a champ and runs as smooth as butter. I am super paranoid about the CAPS systems in the ISC engines so I didn’t let the fuel tank get below halfway, to give it all the help possible drawing fuel under vacuum. I don’t know if it worked or not, but it at least made me feel better about driving it home. I plan on eventually replacing the stock lift pump with a constant positive pressure fuel pump. There are a few guys in some RV groups who have done this with good results. There were a couple small hiccups along the way, but for the most part everything went great. One issue I had initially was keeping the bus cool during transits on hot days. To remedy this I just opened all the windows and cranked up all the bus heaters to help pull heat away. Doing this kept coolant temps 185-195 degrees. Another issue was the fan for my oil cooler didn’t work, so I would occasionally have to pull over or slow down to 55MPH to cool down the hydraulic oil which runs power steering and the engine fan. Definitely one of my top priorities is going to be working on the cooling system(s).
Some of the things I loved the most were the integrated retarder in the MD3066R and the cruise control system. It made my ~1600 mile ride home so freaking easy. Another thing that helped was somehow, some way, 6th gear was already unlocked on the bus.
This allowed me to keep my cruising RPMs around 1800-1900, even with shorter gearing ( 5.38 ). I didn’t think these busses came with 6th gear unlocked, especially not Bluebird. I’m thinking it came like that from the factory because the transmission serial on Bluebird’s vantage portal is the same transmission serial that is on the bus. Is this common?? I let the bus hit 70MPH once to see if it could. It definitely could get up to 70 MPH relatively easily, but I mostly cruised around the 60-65 MPH range
I’m super pumped to introduce myself to all of you, and learn more about the skoolie life!
Take care,
Richard
Linear Mode
