#208 A trip to California to get our dream school bus? Don't tell Big Yell

okay so what i think i want to do is i want to have a beneficial mutual exchange meaning you give me something and i give something back so i'll put up videos of me driving and some various things that come up in my job i'll show you plus all the other stuff of bus related camping just anything if you find any value in it fine if you don't um understood in exchange you watch you watch it and i give you a video i'll never ask for money i've never saw any merch i don't even care if you click the subscribe button ring the bell spread it around all right more importantly well i found out after looking at that bus that i should have bought the first go-ron it turns out that it's sold and when i called the guy he actually sold it to somebody from haiti believe it or not and the reason for the uh the engine and those parts that were in that bus as well are parts to that engine the air compressor some brackets and pulleys when i first started uh looking at buses i kind of found out early that a lot of people from uh other countries actually will come to the united states or at least they'll use the online to purchase buses and they like the older ones because they don't have some of the uh environmental restrictions as we do so that bus there is going to be uh going off to uh haiti i guess it was already bought and paid for but they just haven't shown up yet to pick it up so i think i've said this before big yell was kind of an experiment uh of course we were traveling on the motorcycle staying in hotels we tried the tent camping thing but uh two people that are in their uh middle age you just can't bring enough stuff on a motorcycle to sleep in a tent just not comfortable not one time did we go out on a motorcycle and sleep in a tent was i ever comfortable uh i just my back always hurt or we were just the nights would get cool enough it would be cold can't carry enough blankets and stuff like that so then we were doing some more hotels which was okay but when the bed bug situation became a thing that kind of freaked us out a little bit and to be honest with you regardless how much you clean uh a hotel room there's just nothing better than your own pillow and covers and your own bed so we decided that let's i can't even remember what sparked the bus i think maybe i saw a youtube video and somebody did something similar but anyways so we started looking for a school bus and uh we probably looked at about a half a dozen before we bought big you're very limited to uh what's available through private sale not that many people on school buses and there is a school bus auction place near where we live and we looked around there and talked to the guy who was one of the yard guys who he kind of gave us a lot of advice include us in and but we wind up falling behind big hill from ohio and if you remember that video i put up when we went back up to ohio to the same place where we got big yell and i looked at another one we found that my wife found it on facebook marketplace and i never even knew about facebook marketplace because i don't go on facebook but now i'm constantly uh now i'm always on marketplace because uh i find it much easier to navigate than uh craigslist and you can move your location all over the united states and whatever it is you're looking for if it's there if somebody posted something a big yell was like a three to four year experiment we were hoping to get three to four years out of it to decide if we were going to stick with the bus thing or when we have moved on to something else and i can honestly say i'm just not a big fan of rvs whether you tow it whether it's a motorhome mainly because of the roofs always leak on it it's a given that any rv given the time is going to leak um i've already i've had a couple travel trailers so i've got experience with them and this the motorhome i've never had one but we we did look at a few but for what you spend for them and especially now after the the simple basic build what we did in big yell which i'm actually i mean i would like a few more little things uh i think the next bus we build we're gonna have uh definitely running water hot water um i do already have electric for 110 i've got outlets i've got a 12-volt system as far as the uh we've got a little shower which i would like to upgrade that and as far as our uh doing a number two we just use a body chair with a bucket and the bags and the cedar chips i just find that to be so easy i find it to be more cleansier because you've got no tank in the bus and those smells are coming up because once you do your business uh typically what we do is you can you know you do your business in it for at least two days and the cedar chips and we use some uh like a febreze spray and there's just no odor and uh it's only when you start urinating a little bit too much that's really where you start to get some smell but we never go that long wherever we're at there's always somewhere there's a garbage or a dumpster you just tie the bag up and uh put a new bag in and it's just that simple so to have all the plumbing and storage tank for it it's to me it's a waste uh the thing i don't like about an rv i don't like just you feel like you're cramped in there and tight and to buy one brand new they're extremely expensive if i were to look at anything it would probably be like a 24 footer to a 26 foot and even just a couple years old you're looking at anywhere between 20 grand and 50 60 depending and that kind of money just yeah i just i just for what we do it's just really not worth it and i've i've actually become really uh comfortable and and enjoy the way our bus is basically set up it's simple if i have an issue with anything i don't have to tear out walls to get to anything because it's basically just a practical it serves the purpose the main goal is to just transport me to go see things and explore that's the number one goal and to make it just enough comfortable that if it's raining outside you got somewhere to hang out comfortable bed i can get a shower i can take a crap in it i can wash dishes watch tv all right but basically when i'm not doing stuff i want to be outside and doing something i don't want to just sit in a uh campground twiddling my thumbs staring at the next guy it's just never been my thing but anyways i've always been a mechanic uh kind of a gearhead i've always loved automotive engines but i've gotten away from cars i used to be really into cars when we were younger god we put engines transmissions in and out of cars i mean we did all our own work but now that i'm older i've kind of got a passion for the diesel engine and i'm really into just people that take old like buses and kind of resurrect them not literally rebuild them to like brand new more so to just uh get them up and running and use them and kind of have that patina on them you know showing some age i mean obviously not something that's a piece of junk and unsafe but uh one of the guys that i enjoy watching on youtube is uh grease monkey he travels around in a vintage bus working on other people's buses and he'll take a bus that's been sitting on somebody's property for years and in just a couple days he can have it running and road worthy new tower shops put on it whatever it needs he'll rebuild an engine in somebody's yard and i just love the idea of seeing something getting another uh second win so to speak and the school bus serves me well because it's not too big it's not too small it's easy to work on i mean to get under it you don't even have to jack it up anything bigger like a coach bus you're just for what we do i like to go in the woods with the bus obviously you've seen that before and i like to travel across the country and the school bus does just fine you know i would like it to go a little faster would be kind of nice but you can't have it all the bigger the bus the more expensive they are to maintain and operate i like the international bus like ours at first i wanted a flat nose but after i realized that the ground clearance i didn't quite care for that and uh having the hood open like on ours what they call the dog does just makes working on the engine so much easier so i like i said before i bought big yell and as long as we've owned big l since 2017 until now i'm always looking at buses you know looking for that one that just uh i've gone and looked at quite a few it's not that i need a bus but yeah so i said to dana if money was not an issue and i've got the room on the property i probably could own a dozen buses i've sort of fallen into that that i just like these older buses there's a few models out there i'd like to have some for just different features some because they've got different engines but it's kind of tough it can be an expensive hobby if you're doing that and i really don't want to have a bunch of buses sitting on my property and if they're not going to get used then you're merely just buying lawn heart and spending anywhere between 1500 to 5 grand on the monarch like i said if i had what they call fu money then i'd do it but as i said big l being an experiment uh big l is up there in age which the age doesn't bother me quite as much but now that we've owned big gal we've kind of you start to say like okay well if we could do this again we'd like to have a bus that's just a little bit shorter maybe has a bigger engine in it big gal just has the smaller the inline six i would like to get the bigger the 466. i still want to try to stick with the older engines but the big thing is you have to uh the big the big priority with a bus is trying to find one that's essentially rust free now big gals in good shape that originally came from virginia for her age she's in good shape but she's got signs of you know uh rust but you're gonna have that because she spent probably the last seven years in ohio running in through all that snow and assault so i've been actually expanding my search on marketplace looking down south florida georgia because if you go out to california in arizona or down south buses that are as old as big l they're being uh 30 years old the underneath of them they almost look like they're brand new i mean there's no rust on them it's just amazing that you can have a 30 year old vehicle and just in a better climate look you know close to new than what they look like when they're in these northeast climates you know the winters just do uh they're just hard on metal salt calcium plus you got the heat cycles you know it's hot and it's cold so now i've i've kind of i've always looked on ebay craigslist and i knew about golfdeals.com you can buy just about anything so i looked on govdeals.com and what i call the cream of the crop for me there's about five buses that a los angeles school district is auctioning off and what they do is they just they put them under this govdeals.com there's all these terms and conditions um you have to put a deposit down if you're going to bid i think it's at least 50 bucks because they just don't want people coming in and if you're not serious they don't want their time wasted and i think it's a one-shot deal with them if you don't behave or if you don't play by the rules you're banned from it you can never uh you can never use their site again but they so happen to have five internationals 1995 they are a seven or eight window i can't remember but they have a handicapped door so that gives you three doors to get into the bus and here's where they're just for myself um this is the ultimate bust this would be absolutely perfect number one they're from california they're rust free they're from a school district and they just come out of service from the school district so that means that up until they just came out they're being maintained just about all of them got uh the tires are like 75 or better they're sitting on air ride suspension which is just that's in itself is has so much value some of them you can tell they've got brand new shocks on them uh they're automatics of course it means they're 95 they've got the mechanical engines in them i mean these buses are just what what what you would really want if you're into a bus conversion and you're good with that size of a bus i mean when i saw these i just about you know just was ecstatic to know you know to find these and these are these buses or at least with the mechanical engines they're getting harder and harder to find and with california you're just they they don't have any of that old mission stuff anymore you can't even come into california unless your vehicle has the up-to-date emissions on it and it even says on the big site there's a restriction these buses cannot be bought in state you have to live outside of the state because what they're trying to do is they don't want these buses that don't have all the emissions on it they don't want them to remain in their state they're trying to get rid of them however though when you buy from these you just an auction you you know pitchers uh just can be deceiving and it just really you don't really know exactly what you're getting if you're experienced in looking at vehicles i mean you have a good idea there are some things that you can look at and you can just about almost know that looking at this part assures me that the rest of this would be okay or whatnot but there's always a lot of hidden things you just don't know until you would actually uh pick the bus up but my thinking was these basically have the main platform that i'm looking for they've got the chassis it's the size of the bus they're they're from california so they're extremely clean and it's got air ride suspension okay that alone to me just is worth a lot of value even if the engine in transmission something was wrong with it if i were to get both of them rebuilt just have a new slate get the engine get the transmission both overhauled then i know what i got and any other little miscellaneous things on the bus to take care of now you've got yourself something that now it could run another 30 years you know you've got peace of mind rather than you buy a bus this gold and you went and looked at it it's got everything you want but you don't really know the internal uh wear that's on these the engine and transmission i mean it's kind of a gamble either way how you do it but so the way i looked at it is if you could pick up either any one of these five buses if you could get them for say 1500 bucks right you could actually just park that bus out and make more money off of that just the fuel pump on these buses are worth eight hundred dollars but if i bought the bus and now i've got the main bones even if i rebuilt the engine in transmission let's just say that cost me a total of 15 000 and i know what you're thinking like wow 15 grand plus the price of the bus plus what it's going to take to get the bus brought back to pa let's just say all in all you're at 20 thousand dollars right okay so now i spent 20 grand but i got a vehicle that i know i'll get a minimum of 30 years out of it i'll be dead by then maybe well maybe not but um tell me twenty thousand dollars right i can convert the bus inside and make it for what i want and i could do it a little nicer than what i did big gill and i could still probably be under about 20 i could still be at about 25 000 or or even less because i'm not living in a bus so i don't need solar some of the main ticket items and i could repurpose a lot of material again maybe upgrade it make things a little bit nicer so i figured even if i kind of splurged at 5 000 on the inside i'm at 25k right okay now at 25k not only do i have a solid bus that buses don't leak water at least through the roof but you know maybe the windows you got to seal them up i've got a rebuilt engine rebuild transmission i'll rebuild the uh rear end check all the brakes make sure everything's good but the main frame there's no rust on them you don't have to worry about the vehicle rotting away now i've got this converted bus this kind of ultimate i can go in the woods with it i can run cross-country um and i've designed it the way that works for us rather than having to buy something that you know you're kind of limited to what somebody already built so at 25 000 you might say holy that's a lot of money try to find a motorhome for 25 000 that it may not lead it may not have leaked yet but it's gonna leak and 25 000 motorhome uh there's so many downsides of it for me that i wouldn't want to own one because most things in a motor home or an rv it's cheap quality if you're going to replace the exact component you have to go to an rv store to try to work on them they're expensive and they're a son of a to work on because they have low ground clearance and they use a fan chassis and to try to work on the engine i mean they're just that's why i i keep trying to steer away from these shuttle buses because i know working on the engines they're just a pain in the ass but as i said you probably to get a really good if you're looking for like a 30 year hey i bought my next rv and i plan on keeping it for 30 years i don't think you're going to buy an rv at 25 grand and it'd be as good as the first year that it bus could be just as good in 30 years that rv is going to be leaked waterlogged you know half the inside ain't going to work so to some it might sound like an expensive idea but i think it's right up there where here you know if i want something of that size and i want a vehicle to travel in you know you're going to spend that one way or one way or the other so that's kind of my thoughts on the uh whole bus situation and why i'm doing what i'm doing and it's not the whole bus thing that you know one of the things i don't like is the attention that it brings i mean i i find it cool i like the idea of a bus you know i i like old vehicles like that i but i don't like that when we do have to go to a campground because we're just staying uh staying there for the night or something like that or if we go to one for our because of our granddaughter she wants to be around playgrounds swimming pools and stuff like that i just don't like the attention that it brings because it just it gets to be annoying people want to look inside and they just talk and stare which rightfully so i understand why um i just you know that's my i said to my wife there's nothing about a motor home or an rv that gets me excited to want to go buy one i think they're just overpriced and i when you go to these campgrounds it just to me it looks like it's a competition everybody seems like they're trying to outdo the next person i just i find this to be a more it's not about an economical way i just think you know it's like anything else what what works for you you know everybody looks at things different wants things that are different so you know for people that want to buy motor homes and rv's hey you know i mean i wouldn't snub snub my nose at them and uh you know they shouldn't snub their nose at me though we were at this one campground that we got there kind of late of course we're coming through and all these brand new travel trailers 50 60 000 pickup trucks and this one woman my wife heard her say oh a school bus really and the way she said it was you know as if like we didn't belong there well we only stayed the night there we just left in the morning and uh but that's where a lot of people are like that you know they went out and they spent 60 80 90 100 000 between their trailer and the vehicle to pull it they don't want to be parked next to a bus you know i don't know what's the difference right but people are like that you know and i mean hey if they you know i don't want to say they have the right to do it because when you're going to a state campground there is no discrimination and i don't want to be camping next to people like that anyways that's why i don't even like canned fries i really i want my neighbors to be trees not humans i mean there's a lot of good people don't get me wrong we're in the camping world but i mean if i'm going camping to be on the outdoors i don't want to be stuck in between two other people it's all right well that's that be a nice long video for those that like the long ones for those that don't i'm sure you've already bailed out nobody's holding it down to your head

Channel: Bobin Abus

Views: 554

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: MHzfm5BpMT0

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021