Quote:
Originally Posted by cadillackid
a CPS sensor fail, sucks but falls under the repairable on the road category...
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If you know what you're doing. (I really don't. I know more than the average bear, but what does a bear know about bus repair?)
Quote:
Originally Posted by cadillackid
Ohio busses may get rusty but they tend to run great..
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I've wondered about that. It seems that the buses that don't get rusty DO rack up huge numbers of miles and engine hours. I guess you pick your poison.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cadillackid
just be prepared(not to be confused with scared) to break down in any bus you have... chsnces are you get many miles and trips out of a well maintained bus without issues.. ive run a ton of miles on both my busses...
-Christopher
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I'm always prepared for a breakdown. I've driven old vehicles my whole life (except for my current car, a 2014 Toyota Prius v... AWESOME VEHICLE... 153,000 miles so far with NO TROUBLE AT ALL)...... so in any of my vehicles, there's always a "breakdown kit". (Naturally the one in the '72 Caddy is substantially larger than the one in the Prius!) I usually bring jumper cables, a small assortment of tools, a bottle of oil, etc.
The problem is... the way we roll, a breakdown would probably be a bad thing in a professional sense. If we ONLY used the bus for vacations, and we broke down, oh well. But, we'll be using it as a traveling rig for playing shows all over the place, among other things. A breakdown would probably prevent us from making a show... and then it makes us look flaky, and we fight enough of an uphill battle against "musicians are flaky" as it is! (A facility where we played in 2013, and many times in the past, blackballed us because we kind of broke down en route to our show there, and had to keep the RV parked in an inconvenient but not unsafe place on their property for several hours until the mechanic was able to fix us up. I say "kind of broke down" because the alternator failed, yet there was enough juice in the battery to get us where we had to go. Yes, when we turned off the engine upon arrival, it didn't even click when we tried to crank it again. The funny thing is that WE MADE OUR SHOWS ON TIME... but they haven't had us back since, because of that experience! Go figure!)
So... avoidance of breakdowns would be a really good thing.
I know that a lot of people talk about not wanting to get a rusty bus, but I see it this way. I don't know for sure that I will want to have a bus for a long time. I think it'd be a cool thing now, but I once thought that having an RV would be cool. So we got the RV and used it for the better part of a year, but then once we got our house in early 2014, the RV just sat and sat. I drove it occasionally just to keep everything running, but when I sold it in May 2016, it had amassed maybe 30 miles in 2 1/2 years. I never thought we wouldn't use it. So if we get a bus, we might use it for a while, and then if it sits... will I want to have a lot of money tied up in it? Definitely not. Therefore, there's a certain logic to buying a cheap bus that runs well even if it is cheap because it has rust... or at least so I think. (You or anyone else on this forum can feel free to tell me why you disagree with this statement if you do disagree with it.) We don't make much money, so it's not like we could easily eat a $10,000 loss if we bought a really nice bus and eventually had to offload it for a huge loss because of depreciation or whatever. (We took a $7,000 bath on the RV and that was heartbreaking! It's a lesson learned. We paid $12,000 for it, put about $3,000 into it, and then had to sell it for $8,000 because that's the most anyone would give us for it.)
So it's like this... if I get a $2,000 bus and it rusts out... I'm out two grand, unless you figure that I could probably part it out and scrap the body for close to that much money.
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