Clouse House Skoolie Build

[Clouse House]

Clouse House Skoolie

Hello everyone! Just getting a thread started for my new to me bus and build. Hoping to not only keep track of my build here but to also put up future plans for everyone and anyone's input.

I'm currently in my late 20's almost 30's with a fiancée and two young boys. I've worked in the warehouse industry for practically my entire adult life and I've always been a "why pay someone when I can do it" type person. About two months before my first son was due our landlord at the time told us he had intentions to sell the house and that we needed to find somewhere else to live. In a panic we bought a "fixer upper" that needed quite a lot of fixing. Over the past four years I have remodeled the entre house, ran plumbing for the bathrooms, built a deck, ran electric out to the deck and installed a breaker box in the shed, and so much more. Then just two months ago at the peak of the 2022 housing market inflation we sold that house. I'm hoping that with my experience from remodeling the house and with the nest egg leftover from paying off the mortgage, I'll be able to build a nice Skoolie for my family to call home. We do plan on living in it full time and travelling for the first 2-3 years, then potentially settling down back home or in a new location if we happen to fall in love with it. At that point we would use the skoolie as a foundation for a homestead or who knows, maybe we'll just keep travelling.

We found a 2008 IC PB30500 only about four hours from us that we purchased about a month ago. It is a 40ft flat nose rear engine school bus with a Maxxforce DT engine and an Allison 3000PTS transmission. At the time of purchase it was still registered to the school district as an active duty bus and had just passed the school board inspection. The PO had simply wanted to try out a different career and was on the fence about selling the bus. We helped him make that decision. After traveling home and taking the bus up and down over 6 miles at 6% grade I discovered that it had a few "minor" problems. A pin hole coolant leak on a 4in long coolant hose leading to the oil cooler, just big enough to make a mess at high temps and under load but small enough to not leak at idle. I also discovered a power steering leak, not sure yet if it's the hose or the fitting but it is also a slow leak.

We already have plans on modifications to the bus that are unskoolie related such as an external oil cooler, trans cooler, possibly aftermarket EGR's and plumbing in a second radiator. Since we plan on towing a vehicle behind us and have family both in the north east and out west we would be driving a lot in the desert heat and in the mountains. And I just want to make sure that the engine and transmission are well taken care of for those journeys.

I have spent close to six months planning out our build. I have a floor plan, a solar plan, a water tank diagram, an electrical closet diagram and more to share with everyone and get opinions on. I'm really looking forward to getting feedback from everyone on my family's first journey together.

 

[Clouse House]

Below is the floor plan that I have come up with. It is very much so inspired from watching tours on youtube over the past six months. This is probably the third draft that I have made so far with this style layout and this one was actually made on excel. Each square is a 1in square. So I should be able to go off of this during the build for my dimensions.
The yellow areas have some kind of obstacle that can be dealt with; the wheel wells, and the rear engine cover. The tannish area is another obstacle just to separate it from the yellow in the rear, it is also part of the engine cover just at a different height. The red area is the engines intake and is a "no build" area, or at least a "needs access" area.

I have taken several measurements from both inside and outside of the bus:

Inside:
-ceiling is 6ft 6in
-wall to wall width wise is 7ft 6in
-windshield to the end of the heater compartment is 12in
-windshield to back of drivers seat is 61in
-stairs are 35in wide
-driver area is 32in wide
-front wheel well is 12in from stairs
-front wheel well is 46in long
-front wheel wells have 42in gap between them
-rear wheel well is 35in from the engine cover
-rear wheel well is 46in long
-rear wheel wells have 42in gap between them is
-highest platform on engine cover is 70in from passenger side to bottom of air intake housing
-highest platform on engine cover is 40in deep
-lower extension on engine cover is 19in deep
-driver side emergency door is 189in from back wall
-driver side emergency door is 25in wide

Outside:
-Rear bumpstop to frame 2.5in
-rear tire to wheel well 10.5in
-front bumpstop to frame 4.5in
-front tire to wheel well 9in

The other measurements are more relative to the underbody storage I plan on building so I'll save them for then.

I plan to shorten the rear wheel wells up to 6in to accommodate the toilet area and shower. Unfortunately out of all of those measurements I did not measure the height of the wheel wells inside the bus. I'm hoping right now as I type this at work that 6in is enough to make them level with the metal floor, if not then hopefully to atleast get them below the new floor level after adding the 2.5in of insulation/subfloor.

 

[Clouse House]

Finally got the seats out this week. Took us about seven hours of work stretched out over about three days. The majority of our seats had only two legs on the aisle side with two bolts in each leg and the other side of the bench was fastened to a ledge on the wall with three bolts. There were two seats, in front of and behind the emergency door, that had four legs with two bolts each. And finally one seat had the midship heater attached to the bottom of it with four brackets that rotated out of the way.

Our process was to first tackle the bolts going through the floor. I sat under the bus with a 1/2in socket on an extension and ratchet as well as a crescent wrench for any tricky to reach nuts, while my wife had a 1/2in socket on an impact driver. I would hold the nuts in place while she unfastened the bolts. About halfway through I realized that I could loosen the nuts from underneath the bus with no one holding the bolt in place, I'm assuming the rust on the bolt held it in place for me. So she gave me the impact driver and I started unfastening the nuts from under the bus and then pushing the bolts up through the hole. Every chair had at least one leg, normally the rear one, that was bolted through the floor and a 4in length of 2in angle iron. The buses undercoating was applied after the angle irons were put in place from the looks of it, so I had to give the angle iron a good whack to get to come off. I wouldn't want those to come off later down the road and cause damage to the bus or someone else. Removing the angle iron did leave bare metal exposed so I went back the next day with a can of undercoating to spray on. Also, the two seats in front of and behind the emergency door had larger fasteners than the rest of the seats, we needed to use 5/8 sockets for those.

After that we tackled the bolts that went through the ledge on the wall. They were once again held in with a nut on the bottom. This time my wife went down the passenger side with the impact driver and a crescent wrench and I went down the driver side with an electric ratchet and a crescent wrench. All 1/2in fasteners. The front bolt was only accessible after folding up and forward the seat's bench. It was held down by a swivel bracket that moved out of the way very easily. Some seat benches could not be folded up as the A/C lines were in the way. For these seats we just detached the bench from the frame, they were attached to the hinge brackets with a total of four phillips head screws. The rear bolt was easy to reach from behind the seat, nothing special there. So we both went down our sides of the bus undoing those two on each seat. The third bolt was inline with the backrest and had very little access as the backrest was touching the wall. After trying a couple different methods we found the easiest/fastest method was to put the crescent wrench against the bolt head in the channel created between the seat and wall and use the electric ratchet on the nut below. First turning slowly to align the bolt head with the crescent and then unfastening the nut. Unfortunately the electric ratchet only had enough torque when it was above 80% charge so there were frequent battery changes.

Last was carrying the seats to the emergency door and pushing them out in a way that would hopefully avoid the metal legs coming back and hitting the bus. I could get about five seats out before I had to get out of the bus and move the pile somewhere else as it was too tall to push more out on top of it. After that we walked around for a bit to get a better feel of how big the space we are working with will be.

The before and after:

 

[magnakansas]

Wow

That is a lot of bus.

William

 

[DeMac]

Well Done

You are progressing well. Seat removal is a bus converter's right of passage. Recycling the pile of seats & seat material is a chore in of itself.

Your IC RE is very similar to ours. For preview of the demo options ahead, please peruse our Interior Demo & Modification albulm. (details in the photo descriptions).

We look forward to your next update.

 

[HazMatt-SKO]

That was an extensively informative, comprehensive, and entertaining read.
[emoji106] Nicely done! [emoji106]

 

[Clouse House]

Didn't get a whole lot done this week. Spent Monday breaking down the seats for recycling. Our local metal recyclers told us they'd take the seats as they were for free, but if I wanted scrap metal price I'd have to tear them down. So I did.

I removed the benches first, just four screws total, two in each swing bracket. Removed the metal plate and swivel lock that hold them down as well. Threw all of the metal brackets and screws in a box to scrap as they were mostly rusted.

Flipped the chairs upside down so I could cut the vinyl backing from the seat. The bottom of the vinyl is stapled to a piece of furring strip that is screwed into the metal frame. I found it easiest to just cut the vinyl about an inch from the staples using a box cutter, than to actually remove the vinyl. They used a LOT of staples. After cutting the vinyl I flipped the seat back onto its feet and pulled the vinyl off. I ended up keeping four of the nicer seat back vinyls to use as free tire covers.

The foam cushion is sandwiched around the metal back with the front and back piece glued on the sides. A Majority of them I could pull up on the foam and it would come right off. But some of them had some glue overspray that glued the foam to the metal itself. For those I had to cut the foam seam to get inside and then I could just run my hand between the foam and metal to pull them apart. Either way it was a pretty easy process.

Unfortunately as I was restacking the bare metal seats I hurt my back and had to call it quits that day. I decided two days later that hurt back or not I didn't want to waste the week so I took a couple ibuprofen and went back out to load my Econoline up with all the seat bottoms, vinyl, and foam cushions. I then drove that down to the local recycling center to unload it all.



After coming back to the house we loaded the metal seats in a rented trailer from TSC and took them down to the local metal scrap. I got about $60 so it paid for the trailer and lunch after, which was good enough for me.
My back still hurts now but I'm hoping that on Monday I'll be good to go and can start taking out the rear heater and floors.

Also on Tuesday I received my shipment of water tanks. It was about 2 months before the quoted arrival time so I was surprised and excited. Turns out they sent me the wrong tanks on accident. The same dimensions as I needed but I had ordered tanks with no fittings as I wanted to choose the location/size for my needs. I contacted them and they understood, they have agreed to swap them out as my original order does specify a "blank tank." I'm curious if the new ones will arrive just as fast or if it'll be closer to the original delivery date.

 

[Clouse House]

This weeks followup:

The wrong tanks are still sitting in my driveway, they have assured me they have processed with their third party carrier that they are ready for pickup, however the third party carrier doesn't have a truck nearby with a liftgate so it might be awhile.

On the bus we managed to get the wood and rubber up off the floor. At first we were tackling the rubber with a box cutter and a floor scrapper to get it up. But we very quickly realized that the amount of glue holding that rubber down could probably be used to repair the titanic. So instead we switched to just ripping up the wood with the rubber still on it.
We would hammer a crowbar under the wood sheet and pry it up. The screws would pull through the wood and stay in the metal floor beneath. After prying up the edge of the sheet we would roll an automotive floorjack underneath and use it to jack up the wooden floor. We would cut the rubber as needed and slide the jack in further and jack it up again as needed until it completely lifted from the floor. We did this going down the middle of the bus. We stopped for the day here and started getting ready for a D&D session that night, we've been playing in the bus lately, that's what the table and chairs are for.



The next morning I took a multi tool with a wood blade for plunge cuts and cut squares in the wood around the AC lines going to the evaporators and the carriage bolts that hold the condensers under the bus. At the beginning of each cut I had the multitool at about 8000rpm but slowed it down to 2000rpm at the end of the cut to try and not damage the blade when it hit the metal floor. I did end up going through about three blades to finish this as it was impossible to not hit the blade on the metal floor underneath. But I had purposefully gone out and purchased the cheapest wood cutting blades I could find for it as I knew they would not be able to damage the metal floor underneath.



I cut these squares into the wooden floor so that as we used the floorjack to rip up the wood it wouldn't bother those two things. I plan to go back later and one at a time undo a carriage bolt, remove the square of wood from inside, replace the wood with a 1/4inch piece of flat bar around 2 inches long to help support the weight, then put the carriage bolt back in place. After doing all six per condenser I can tighten the carriage bolts to lift the condenser up to the original install height, making up for the 1/2 inch of lost spacer that was under the carriage bolt originally. With the AC lines I'll just have to carefully cut the wooden square around it into individual pieces that can be removed safely.

After that I decided to tackle the midship heater which wasn't that big of a hassle. I purchased some 3/4inch pipe plugs to put in the 1 inch hoses as a temporary way to keep fluid inside. I plan to eventually rerun the hoses from the midship heater as a secondary radiator to help the engine stay cool on mountain and/or midwest trips. Also I just want to say I managed to get the midship heater out without spilling a single drop of fluid. I cut the power and ground wires going to the heater and then stoop it up with the hoses at the top. This raised it higher than the coolant level in the engine. The hoses were held on with hose clamps that I could fit a 3/8in socket onto. I undid the hose clamps before pulling the hoses off of the heater. A trick for stuck hoses is to grab the hose on the fitting and twist it back and forth, this will most of the time unstick it. As I was pulling the hoses off the heater I could hear the sound of air entering the hose, I assume that was the coolant feeding back into the engine to try and level out. I put in the 3/4inch pipe plug and retightened the hose clamp on it. I did that again for the other hose and that was taken care of mess free. I picked the heater up and tipped it over slowly into a coolant drain pan until no more fluid came out and then carried it off of the bus.



After tackling the heater I went around removing all of the screws that got left behind from ripping up the wood the way we did. Most could come out with just an impact driver and what I call a "fat phillips" bit but occasionally we would come across one that was full of glue and we would take a pair of vise-grips to clamp it so we could unscrew it.



That's the progress we made this week. If anyone wants a midship heater PM me, it was an under seat unit.

 

[PhilipE-SKO]

Throw a tape on that heater and give me over all size. All three directions.

 

[DeMac]

Fat Phillip

The Fat Phillips, mentioned above, are likely the Pozidriv type. They two look very similar to eachother. The Pozidriv tool has 90° cut lines instead of curved, like Philips tips.
Because of this, a Robertson (aka: square-tip; screwlock) can be used, too.

Supadriv uses similar diagonal markings but the bit is nearly identical, too. Frearson & JIS bits look more like Phillips, but you won't have any of those on an IC.

Buy a couple #2 Pozidriv tips, you'll be using the heck out of them on the interior, the factory did.
(#3s on the exterior.)

 

[Clouse House]

Throw a tape on that heater and give me over all size. All three directions.

Midship Heater:
Height - 9in
Width - 10 5/8in
Length - 30 1/4in

 

[cadillackid]

unless you are broke, or are restoring a bus to original state, there are much better options for heating an area of a bus quietly and effectively.. those underseat heaters make a lot of noise and dont put out a lot of heat..



now the Copper heater core coils within them? they make GREAT hydronic heating coils for use with ducted Minisplits in a house using hydronic heat.

 

[Clouse House]

Haven't had much chance to work on the bus the past couple weeks due to an operation I had, but I believe I'm all healed up from that now. So I should be able to start posting some progress again soon.

In the mean time I did receive the correct water tanks on Tuesday and my all in one inverter/charger/mppt controller arrived on Thursday. I have them both loaded up in my van to keep them out of the weather.
I should be able to start building my insulation box/hangers for the tanks soon.

At this moment I'm focused on the buses engine and getting it back to running at 100% follow along with that over on this post:
https://www.skoolie.net/forums/f37/another-warn-engine-light-question-40322-2.html#post483489

I'm excited to get back at it.

 

[Clouse House]

Took a long break from working on the bus, my wife had an accident and injured her knee. After surgery, healing, and 3 months of PT she's up and walking again so back to working on the bus.
In the mean time I took care of the engine issues, ended up replacing all six injectors, figured since I already had it all torn apart it would give me piece of mind to do the other 5. After that I noticed a coolant leak, took awhile to track that down, turned out when I was messing around with the valve cover I knocked a hose clamp loose on the EGR cooler. Tightened that back up and she's all good. Took her for a four hour drive yesterday up and down some hills, managed about 55mph at a constant 180F, pushing it to 65mph on the straight and levels raised it to about 190-200F but no higher than that, so I'm pretty happy. In the hills we struggled to maintain 65mph but 55mph was easy enough with my foot to the floor, still in that 190-200F range. Of course cooling off as soon as we got to a down hill or a straight and flat again. So pretty happy with overall performance after the issues I've had. Oh! and my wife drove the bus for the first time too.



I've learned to never take my bus into a Cumberland International dealer/mechanic ever again, but it gave me the push I needed to learn my engine inside and out.

As far as the conversion I've made some progress in removing the ceiling panels and eliminating the window/door buzzers. But that's about it. Luckily only two of the screws gave us any issues when removing all the panels. We also managed to lower the AC blowers without damaging them in any way. I plan to keep the front and mid blower and remove the rear blower, if anyone's in the market for an AC system.
Here's what the bus looked like before I cleaned it up for our test drive:

 

[Dbacks2k4]

ended up replacing all six injectors, figured since I already had it all torn apart it would give me piece of mind to do the other 5.

Probably wise. In our fleet we'd historically replaced one injector when it fails, then do all 5 when the second failed. We found though that in every situation the second one fails within a couple months of the first and we were opening up that valve cover again and having to do the O-ring kit so just started doing them all to cut down on those O-ring costs as well as what we were paying our mechanic in labor to do it all.

 

[Clouse House]

This past week I finished removing the roof insulation, ended up using a 10in taping knife to scrape the stuck on insulation and glue to scrape everything off. I had a wide mouth piece for my shop vac and held that below where I was scraping to catch as much f it as I could for an easier clean up later.

Also removed the rear evaporator and blower from the bus, traced the hoses to the dryer and removed it. Still need to trace the hose form there to figure out which condenser is coming out but it's almost taken care of. Doing my best to remove everything, panel for switches and all, then seal the ends of the hoses if anyone one else needs an engine ran AC unit for their bus. Only thing they'd need to fabricated is a bracket to hold the compressor.

Didn't do a whole lot this week but I feel like I did pretty good for only 4 hours of work.

 

[Clouse House]

Been awhile Since I've put up an update so here it goes.

I removed the panels below the window to the best of my ability in order to remove the old insulation, seal the bottom of the wall and in the future reinsulate it.

Here are a majority of the tool I used:


I started by marking a chalk line along the wall at the height of the bottom screw for the window brackets. This gave me about an inch of metal overhang left under the window. I then went through and unscrewed each and every screw holding on the wall panels, I would recommend a Ph#4 impact bit for this, that was the size that fit the screws nicely. For any screw that would not come out I used my angel grinder to cut a notch in them, placed my largest flathead screwdriver in said notch then hit the screwdriver a couple times with a 2lbs hammer to give it a good shock before unscrewing it. Sometime I'd still have to put a wrench on my screwdriver to get enough umph to get it to come out. When that was finished I took the window brackets off for about 3 windows at a time, since I was cutting the panels back above the bottom of those brackets. I used electric shears to cut through the panels, I would recommend this way if you can. No sparks, it's not loud, easy to get a straight line, and doesn't create a mess. Some areas close to the c-channels I wasn't able to get the shears in close enough, so I did use the angle grinder to finish those off.



After pulling the insulation I found gaps in the metal at the bottom of the wall spaces that I plan on closing before installing new insulation. I haven't done it yet but the plan at the moment is to use seam sealer ran through a hose to get it to where I want it.

 

[Clouse House]

Moved on to the floor after that. I had quite a bit of loose surface rust on my floor so I started by using my grinder and a braided steel wheel to remove loose rust from the entire floor. Of course a mask, hearing protection, and eye protection on this one is kind of a given but I'd also suggest this set up with a box fan and air filters:



It is a 20in box fan and four 20 x 20 x 1 air filters. The bottom is cut out of the fan box and it is all held together with duct tape. Fan is orientated to blow upwards and it really did a great job at capturing the really fine dust that was getting thrown into the air., so I didn't have to worry too much about what I might be breathing in. I dragged it around with me as I took care of the floor and by the end all four filters were completely clogged, and the fan was collapsing the filters inward. I went with my shopvac afterwards to get the heavier rust dust that was on the floor.

I used Chassis Saver paint on the floor as it was safe to use on an untreated metal surface. This stuff will not come off of anything. I got it on my finger nails and it was there until my nail grew out and I clipped them. I painted around stuff that was on the floor and then with my second coat I moved them to get the spots a missed, and then came back and hit those specific spots with their own second coat. I also painted up the walls two or three inches just to help with sealing between the wall and floor panels. I left all the bolt holes from the seats open to allow any water from accidents on the bus a way to drain and now that water beads up on the surface of my floor. I'm sure it drain just fine.



We were excited to finally lay out the floor plan on the bus so I picked up some orange ground marking paint and measured it all out with a laser measure and laid down the lines for everything. It all ended up pretty close to where it was expected and it was nice to be able to walk through and visualize everything.



I'll put the updated floor plan below, both as an image and a pdf if you want to open it up and see the details. On the left side is the layout for the roof, the middle is the floor layout, and the right side is the layout for everything under the bus. Having everything side by side like this allows me to see how the different layers interact with each other. Also, every tiny square is a 1in x 1in square, so it's pretty accurate too.

View attachment Skoolie Layout.pdf

 

[Clouse House]

After the floors was the windows. We decided on keeping the original windows, both for the aesthetic and price point. We decided to reseal the windows even though we had no leaks just as step to prevent future leaks, as well as move the emergency windows to a more preferred location, and to remove about six normal windows and one half window do to their location. The windows we removed are three windows where my boys bunkbeds will be going in. Plan to put some small 6" porthole like windows there for them, I thought they would like that. Some other removals were where the fridge will be, where the pantry will be, and the wall for our bedroom was in the middle of a window as well. The half window was where the wall between the kitchen and shower is, so it had to go. I'm playing with the idea of installing it horizontally on the driver side in the main bedroom just to have more natural light.

We decided to move the emergency windows to the kitchen area to use them like a set of French windows. One set at the stove, and two sets at the sink.



In our case it was pretty easy to remove the windows. Put the window down, unscrew the window brackets, and then use a prybar to gently pry between the top of the window and the wall. Use the open window was handle and your done. The sealant on our windows was like a backer rod covered in butyl. We removed those and cleaned up the majority of the butyl but not all. I wasn't too concerned with removing the old butyl as I was also using butyl to reseal them, and butyl sticks to itself better than anything else.

I used 3/8" butyl on the left and right of the window opening and 1/8" butyl plus 3/8" butyl on the top and bottom of the opening. The way that the sheet metal overlaps creates a slightly larger gap on the top and bottom of where the wall and window frame meet. It seemed to work great, oozing excess butyl out from where they met. After a couple weeks of sitting in the summer sun it seemed to stop oozing out more so I took a knife and trimmed the excess butyl off. I tested all the windows with a pressure washer and no leaks, So I don't think I'll have any issues down the road.

I forgot to mention, above the windows in the opening is a pretty decent empty space, DeMac was a good right up on how he filled that space with backer rod, so I thought I'd try that. But I couldn't find any backer rod that was the correct size near me unless I purchased a 400ft roll and my budget was tight the week we worked on it so I went down to the Dollar Tree and picked up some pool noodles for 2$ each. I cut them down their length into four long pieces, which I then cut to the width of the window opening, and those seemed to fit into that gap perfectly as the gap is kind of triangular in shape. Pool noodles are made of closed cell Polyethylene foam and I kind of smushed them as I installed the window, so I figured it would make a decent insulator, I hope I'm right.

For the window deletes I picked them up from Skoolie.com. They are 16 gauge galvanized steel cut to the size you send them. The four sides have a 1" flange and are predrilled for screws or rivets. I hung them up in painted them black before installing them. I used rivets for my install as I don't see a reason for them ever to come back out again. Intall just like you would when resealing the windows.



I now have six windows in good working condition if anyone needs some. I'll hold onto them for awhile but eventually they'll go to scrap. Let me know if you need them and we can work something out.



I think that has me all caught up to where I am now on the bus.

Next step I have planned is to add an engine access hatch that will be under the bed, giving me easier access to the passenger side of the engine. As right now I have next to no access to it. As well as adding a sight tube to my power steering reservoir as right now it has sight glasses for full and half full, but I'd like to know where between those it is at, it'll also allow me to check the color of the fluid easily.

Keep building everyone.

 

[Clouse House]

I knew I forgot something.

So I decided to remove this guy from the back of my bus:



It was the difference between having a queen size bed or a king size bed fitting back there, and we went for the king size bed. There's only one tricky part to remove it and that is there are some screws holding it in that can only be removed through the intake hole. I'll put a photo below to explain, but essentially after you removing the intake piping that goes up into it from the engine bay you'll have to reach up into that hole to undo about 7 more screws.

]

I plan on rerouting our intake to a lower position. I know this will mean cleaning the filter more often, but I think it's worth it for the added space.





Also, always remember to cover your intake piping when it is exposed for any reason. It saved me some headache later.