Why I won't be ready for the $2020 Challenge

This is awesome 

Moar!

Holy cow, that is not what I was expecting. But it's very cool.

OMG, this is awesome! Cant wait to see the next installment!

All the O3 and below I would see in San Diego always drove expensive foreign sporty or sport-ish cars. Anyone higher typically rocked a decked out SUV. There was one, an O3, that would come through with an '06 GTO that was LS3 swapped. Sounded absolutely beautiful.

You may be the first I've seen that wanted/was willing to live in a bus. So far, very cool.

Also, jfc, I never knew base housing could be so varied like this at other bases. 

What could go wrong? ;)

In reply to jstein77 :

I promise you, "what could go wrong" was not a phrase that went through either of our minds. It was a tense couple of days.

In reply to FuzzWuzzy:

That's more or less accurate for FRKS. Junior O's were mostly driving brand new F-series, if I had to assign a single vehicle to the stereotype. Above O3 was either fancier F-series, fancier Wranglers, or luxury SUVs. I wish I had a dollar for every time I got the stinkeye or more from a ranking officer about my Beetle. I'm not one for adhering to the norms.

Tomorrow's installation will be photo-heavy. Wife took lots of pictures, I assume to show the investigators in the event it went horribly awry.

We got the weather we needed in pretty short order. With the roof supported by the scaffolds, we made the vertical cuts over the front and rear first, then cut the skin under the windows, then cut the ribs from inside the bus (this is where it could really have gone south). Knowing the wind could pick up any time, we worked as fast as we dared lest our movements bounce the suspension and unsettle the somewhat precariously balanced hunk of steel over our heads. We jacked up the scaffolds one end at a time in 4 inch increments using a floor jack welding in six of the rib patches. This gave us enough security that we felt like we could breathe again, though there was still a fair amount of urgency while we patched the remaining ribs.

The local trailer fabrication and metal supply place cut us eight 10 foot by 1 foot strips of 18 gauge steel, and we riveted these into place on the sides at great length and forearm/hand/wrist pain. Roughly 1000 steel pop rivets using a mechanical pop rivet gun. Do not recommend.

We spent a couple of days cleaning up the rusty floor with a wire cup on an angle grinder before shooting primer, followed by foam insulation boards and OSB subfloor.

Note: a few of these photos are slightly out of sequence with the words, with progress shown that I haven't described yet. I suck at documenting, so you get what you get.

That’s amazing how well it went. The redneck engineering is strong with this one. 

As someone who has some knowledge about living in a bus (for 12 years) my first comment is I hope long distance travel is not a goal of yours. City and school buses suck at that.

In reply to Shadeux :

It will never be as nice on the highway as a coach, by a long shot. It's not fast, steering is a little bit darty, suspension is a little bit harsh. Anything else I'm not thinking about that's going to make long hauls suck?

The longest I have plans to drive it is 900ish miles. I suspect most of our use will be much much shorter trips than that.

JohnInKansas said:

In reply to Shadeux :

 Anything else I'm not thinking about that's going to make long hauls suck?

Gearing?

In reply to glueguy :

Yeah, I was generalizing that as "doesn't go fast". One of the data plates that was in the front of the bus said the final drive is 4.44, so that's not ideal for long distance cruising.

I didn't comment on it in the roof raise post, but the extra 10 inches made it so I could walk upright anywhere in the bus (at 6'4"). Looking through other skoolie builds, seems like the average roof raise is 20+ inches; I don't see why anybody would really need that, unless they were freakishly tall or really wanted to be able to stretch their shoulders without touching the ceiling. Weird.

We caulked the original bus windows back in, except for two pairs on each side where we wanted to put the bathroom and have a hint of full-time privacy.

We also reinstalled the front door before my wife bailed on me for work. I cannot overemphasize how precarious that was. A couple hundred pounds of glass and steel the size of a sheet of plywood that wants to hinge open in the center while you're handling it. Installation meant standing it on end, lifting it about 6 inches up, tipping the top toward the opening in the bus so that it would slot into place, lifting another 6 inches or so and sliding the bottom into place. Wouldn't have been able to replace it with something similar if the install hand gone sideways and the door hand broken (are bus salvage yards a thing?), we would have had to redesign around another door.

We were in serious "acquire" mode at this point. Bought an RV toilet, four 4 foot by 6 foot solar panels, deep cycle marine batteries, charge controller, inverter, and a tankless water heater. Found a big stack of engineered flooring on CL for cheap and snagged it up. Gave an old fellow and his wife $20 for a truckload of knotty pine tongue and groove they were tearing out of their house. One of the wife's friends gave us an old kitchen cabinet that his mom had just replaced. In fact, we were reminiscing about the roof raise a couple nights ago, and wife noted that we'd picked up the lumber we used for the roof scaffold after we saw a curb alert on CL.

I had saved half a dozen or so 4 foot by 9 foot steel sheets from the old interior ceiling of the bus, despite my wife's grumbling about sharp pieces of metal laying around in the driveway, and I set out closing off the front and rear ends of the roof using pieces of these leftovers. Lots of CAD during this process, and lots of rivets. Made slow progress over the course of a couple weeks until it was all sealed up. Great fun (looking back now that it's done and I don't have to wrangle flat panels into curved shapes 10 feet up a ladder). It was a 50 footer before paint, but with everything the same color I'd call it a solid 20 footer. Still absolutely feel the overall look turned out much better than most bus roof raises. We spent a lot of time standing in the yard staring at it to make sure it was going to turn out like I had in mind.

I went back later and trimmed the excess off the edges to make the seams a little tidier.

Also popped out the brittle old overhead emergency hatches and replaced with lexan (or maybe acrylic, I don't remember). 3/16 inch thickness, if I remember right. Sealed up the perimeter edges with caulk and riveted to the roof. You can kind of see them with rain beaded up on them in the last photo of the front curve paneling.

In reply to JohnInKansas :

You're right, that looks quite a bit better than the über-roof on the other bus you posted. 

Don't you need one of those two roof holes for an A/C unit?

In reply to noddaz :

We hadn't planned on it. I grew up in a house with no AC, and we really don't use the AC unless it gets north of about 95 degrees. We'd planned on either a window unit or a free-standing room AC unit for those unbearably hot days, and rely mostly on airflow and shade for regular cooling duties. But those skylights haven't fared all that well, so we have some good opportunities coming up to change our position on that. More on that later.

We’ll call this late July or early August, 2018. Mrs. InKansas left for several months for training and I was neck deep in moving all our stuff out of the house and into storage and the new rental house (yeah, we caved; the bus didn’t get done as fast as we had hoped, and the rental was cheap and easy and pretty nice, all things considered). The Army was paying for my move, so I got to run the bus across the scales empty before filling it very nearly to capacity and making the 90 minute drive east. With raised roof and subfloor installed, it weighed in at just over 16,700 pounds. Discovered the joys of high-flow manual shut-off diesel fuel pumps about this time, managed to douse myself diesel in the truck stop parking lot. I'm sorry to say I didn't get any pictures of the bus full of moving boxes; it was properly full though. There was about 8 feet of clear floorspace behind the driver's seat, and the rest of the space was packed full of our crap.

This is Bear. Bear is a stodgy old man. He doesn’t like riding in the car, generally, because he doesn’t like it when the other dogs are in his bubble. Ideally, he gets to ride in the back of a car with enough flat floor space he can lie down and with low enough windows he can observe life happen around him (we call him The Pope). He was indifferent about the bus right up until we drove it home, at which point he realized it was the answer to all his silent prayers for more space and bigger windows to look out. He rode the whole way home just like this, perched on top of the engine cover, tail wagging. Since then, it has been his bus, we’re just working on it for him.

And then life happened. I built the wife’s motorcycle, she finished her training and came home, I got a windfall job, we remodeled the kitchen, she got to travel a whole bunch for work, we got hit with an unseasonably long and harsh winter, I trudged through remodeling my shop, we got hit with an unseasonably long and wet spring, we started remodeling the bathroom.

No joke, I didn’t do a damn thing with the bus for almost exactly year. This is exactly why I didn’t start this build thread until we were closer to done with it.

This is really quite cool!

In early August of 2019, I got word that the process to branch transfer to Aviation in the National Guard was coming along (slowly), and that I could tentatively plan on a flight school date in March 2020. This will be "active duty" time, and will last long enough that the Army will pay me to move there and give me a monthly housing allowance. Housing allowance for my rank winds up being just shy of $1200 a month; at 12-14 months (minimum), I can count on getting in excess of $14k for housing/sustenance. At this point, we were maybe $3k deep into this project. If we could get it done in time for me to live in for flight school, the housing allowance would cover the project budget and most of my living expenses for the year.

That was the motivation we needed. Back to work.

First job was to get the space tidy and figure out where we were going to put the bathroom. We'd drawn out a rough floor plan months before, but nothing with actual measurements tied to it. I cleared the space over the right rear wheel arch and spent an afternoon playing with masking tape on the floor until I had a bathroom shape and size I thought we could work with.

^^ Note: The kitchen cabinet is at frame left, and the fuel filler neck shield is the sloped black box behind the wheel arch. Ultimately, we built a box around the wheel arch and pushed the back wall of the bathroom back about 6 inches to be even with this box. If you look close at the tape below the toilet, the doorway opening is marked with dashed lines at either end.

With the bathroom footprint mapped out and approved by SWMBO, I started framing it off, at least at floor level (without something to tie the top of the studs to, I couldn't work vertically yet). Boxed in the wheel arch to serve as a platform for the toilet. The toilet will sit behind centerline of the rear axle, with drainage down and back to the black tank behind the rear mudflap. We ordered a corner shower base and oriented it sideways; we'll step over the side rather than through the normal doorway spot on the base. The shower sits in front of the rear wheels, and will drain straight down to the grey tank just in front of the rear wheels. Framing was built around the shower base to hold in in place (we'll use mortar underneath too), and was also built over the back of the toilet platform. The longitudinal/hallway wall runs a little past the back wall of the bathroom, making a bit of a closet space right over the fuel filler; there's a metal box that covers the filler neck that makes this floor space essentially unusable, so that's a good spot to cover up with clothes. We may box the filler neck in at a later date to create a short platform for shoes or something, we'll see.

We had collected quite a bit of cast-off construction materials on the cheap; a truckload of old pine tongue-and-groove boards from a local remodel (local from BEFORE we moved; we moved a whole bunch of construction materials in addition to all the stuff that was in our house), a giant stack of engineered hardwood flooring from an Army family who had it replaced prior to selling their house, a kitchen cabinet from a friend's mother who had renovated and wanted rid of it. We also had a whole bunch of leftover insulation from my shop project that we go for a SCREAMING deal (seller screwed up and sold me way more than I needed and charged me for less than I asked for). Wife started getting the usable tongue-and-groove boards sanded and screwed up in the left front wall behind the driver's seat; I felt like we needed some significant and easily-visible progress to help us maintain some momentum, so I started on the ceiling.

We wanted to retain the curve of the roof, and didn't want to attach paneling directly to the metal ribs, as the ribs would conduct heat/cold through the panels via thermal bridging. So I broke out the cardboard and markers and made myself a template. And then I made it with 1/4 inch plywood so it was less flimsy. And then I transferred the pattern to 2x8s and cut 15 "rafters", each made of four pieces. Pretty sure I could have done them in three pieces instead, but I'd have had to use 2x10s and the use-to-waste ratio would have been much worse. 2x8s also kept the grain of the wood mostly along the parts rather than across them, which helped prevent excessive splitting when I installed the pieces. Once I'd cut them with the nice new jigsaw, the rafters got screwed to the face of every other rib with great big self-tapping screws, putting a rafter about every 55 inches.

We got no photos of this. Wife was charging ahead with wall paneling, I think, and I was more worried about making progress than taking pictures of it. This is the best I can do:

Top sketch shows the as-installed layout, bottom sketch shows how the pieces were laid out on the raw lumber. I think I decided the most efficient layout was two center sections on one 8 foot 2x8 for a total of fifteen 8 footers, and the curved sections packed as tight as I could get them on another five-ish 8 footers. With the irregular shapes, I wound up with a lot of firewood.

Because we're parked in a driveway and not a perfectly flat and level work surface, I couldn't just use a plumb bob to find the center mark of the rafters. Instead I measured the center of the floor at front and rear, and tacked in a small finishing nail with the head bent over into a hook. Then I stretched a chalk line vertically to a second nail at the approximate center of the rafter, and measured the distance from the line to the top of the windows (roughly 5 feet up) and adjusted the top nail until the chalk line was centered. With the front and rear rafter centerlines accurately marked, I could snap a chalk line on all the rafters at their center.

While I was at it, I framed in the skylights; as they are on a slight curve, and we'd be running the ceiling boards to them, the boxes needed to be built to match the profile of the rafters.

It was hot a hell, and Mrs. InKansas's idea of putting all the push-out emergency windows on one side really paid off. With all of these propped open, a little breeze goes a long way toward making the space comfortable.

I promise, I have photos showing what got done for the rest of this week's posts.

Two months out from living in this sucker full time, as of this week. Hope we can get it done in time.

With the rafters up, I went ahead and hung the header for the bathroom/hallway wall and cut studs to fit. As previously noted, the back wall of the bathroom wound up living even with the back edge of the wheel arch, so the back wall framing actually steps up onto the back of the box around the wheel arch. Doorway opening is 30 inches; with as tight a space as this bus gives us, we worked really hard to make sure we didn't make the space feel cramped.

Once the framing was done, we could finally get on with hanging the ceiling. 

We decided that it was going to be more trouble than it was worth to try to bend a wood veneer or hard plastic panel to the roof curve AND have the finished product look nice, so we opted instead for nickel gap shiplap boards. I set the first seam directly on the rafter centerlines and worked toward the back and outward from the center until I reached the edges of the skylights. The boards are 12 feet long, so we went with a 4 foot stagger anywhere the run was too long to do with a single board (the spots in front of the front skylight and behind the rear skylight were shorter than 12, so they didn't get any seams; the space behind the bathroom was also short enough to use uninterrupted lengths. The ribs aren't on multiples of 4 feet, so all but two of the end-to-end joints fell between rafters. The unsupported butt joints were braced up by screwing both boards to a playing card-sized scrap of plywood behind the joint. Not structural, but enough support that the ends don't sag.

Once I had a good start on the front ceiling boards, I cut all the insulation. To help keep the insulation from sagging too much where it wasn't supported by ceiling boards yet, I drilled holes through the rafters and threaded paracord through from front to rear and stretched it tight. I think I wound up with three runs of paracord dividing the ceiling span into 4 equal sections. We wound up with 15-inch-wide rolls of the non-irritant fiberglass substitute insulation (which is MAGIC, by the way, SO much nicer than working with fiberglass), so I needed a full width piece and a 3/4 width piece to fill the 26 inch cavities between ribs. This made for a lot of cutting, but the end result was tidy. The pieces were fed over the paracord supports and over the few boards that were hung at the front. Used up something like 8 rolls of the stuff in total. I think it is R13 rated; it won't be enough to keep us toasty in the arctic, but it should be fine if we park it out of the wind in the wintertime, or if we snowbird (or just only live in it part-time).

With the insulation installed, I charged ahead with hanging the shiplap. I had to carefully notch boards to fit around the skylight openings, but once those were done, I worked down the driver's side until I reached the windows. The framing on the right side required notching as well; we are planning to run the wall paneling up into the ceiling cavity slightly and butting the ceiling boards up to the wall. Lots of deliberate measurement and re-measurement and test fitting. Last part to get done was the space directly behind the bathroom, and I came up a couple pieces short (could have done it using shorter sections, but it was under 12 feet, so I wanted to use full length, uncut boards). We left the bathroom for last, as we hadn't fully settled on a ceiling solution yet.

Even in the factory primer, it looked way better than the bare ceiling we'd been looking at for months.

Little late posting today, we're getting freezing rain here and work got cancelled so I'm posting from home.

Next problem to solve was the front and rear end caps for the ceiling. The rear curved section of the roof is lower and more gradual than the one at the front. I’m tall, and I really didn’t want to sacrifice any more of the 10” of headroom I bought with the roof raise (“honey, I think we should have gone with 12 inches instead…” *wife hurls coffee mug at me*).

So I decided on a two-piece cap at the back, with the lower being a vertical rectangular panel, and the upper panel flat on the bottom edge, curved on the top, and sloping toward the front of the bus. The front cap is also two pieces. There’s a fantastic spot above the windshield that we’ve been using as a shelf, and with space at a premium, we’d like to continue using it as such. The lower front piece fits vertically into the “back” of the shelf space with a flat lower edge and a curved upper edge to match the rib profile. We ran short sections of shiplap from the top of the lower end cap piece back to the stock height rib, and blocked off the gap between the shelf ceiling and the bus ceiling with a second cap panel shaped like a crescent moon.

Confused yet? Yeah, me too. I'm an engineer, I do better with diagrams than with words. This should help:

This is WAY more complex than it needed to be, but we haven't done anythimg the easy way so far, why start now?

Wife slapped a coat of primer on the plywood endcaps before she had to skedaddle off to Florida for hurricane aid.

In reply to JohnInKansas :

Looks awesome!