8 THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE STARTING YOUR BUS CONVERSION - IS A SHUTTLE BUS RIGHT FOR YOU?

what is happening amigos welcome back to amore ventura so in the bus van nomad community you get a lot of love and hear a lot about buses and vans but not so much about our dear friends the shuttle buses so in today's episode we're gonna go over eight things that you need to know and keep in mind before you cop your very own shuttle bus let's roll that intro we're fiorillo and zach and in 2018 we bought a shuttle bus to convert to the tiny off-grid eco-home of our dreams we were clueless when we started had no experience but somehow we turned a dream into reality welcome to our bedroom after two years of hard work blood sweat and tears we packed everything we owned and we hit the road and of course we brought along with us our old grumpy lady kiki we're venturing around the u.s sharing all things shuttle bus and sustainable living and we're here with you every thursday so make sure you subscribe and follow along all right so one of the first things and one of the most basic things that you should do with any car and especially with the bus is get under it and look at the rust you're going to want to make sure that it's not too rusted and that all the important parts are in pretty decent condition we bought this baby in ohio she's pretty old almost 20 years old at this point so we do have a little bit of rust under here but we're working with it another thing that's really important is the mileage and the engine and you're going to want to make sure that the engine is in good condition and that there's not too many miles on it we bought her with 149 000 miles on it which might sound like a lot but for this specific engine they can get way way way more than that we made sure the engine was good we got under the hood everything looked really good even a couple of new parts when we bought it so we went for it so the second thing you really want to focus on is making sure that your shuttle bus is in good shape in the exterior shuttle buses are made of fiberglass which is a material very hard to work with when we bought this baby we made sure that it didn't have any dents or anything that needed repair because we didn't know it would take a lot of work to do it ourselves and it would cost a lot of money the one thing it did had was a small dent right back here in the metal area of the bus and we covered it up with some plywood that we treated to be in the outdoors and paint it right over it so the third thing that you're definitely going to want to keep in mind because this is something that we did not think about at all and we've definitely run into some i don't want to call them issues but we've had some experiences with it is the clearance the height so as you can see from this part which is the lowest part of our bus to the floor is only about eight inches so when you're pulling into some spots we love to be in nature and we love to park in obscure areas so sometimes the roads are obviously not the best and when you're turning into that you can scrape the ground hit a couple rocks anything can happen luckily this part's very durable so we haven't had any real issues it just makes a very loud uncomfortable sound but if you're gonna be doing a lot of off-roading that is definitely something to consider another thing to consider not just scraping the bus on the ground is a lot of people put gray water tanks and water holding tanks underneath their bus and in the shuttle bus there's not that much clearance so we didn't feel comfortable putting a big tank under there because that's going to lower your clearance even more and that has even higher potential of hitting the ground or hitting a rock or hitting a root or what have you so that is something to keep in mind we went with an incredibly basic water system so all of our stuff is inside the bus so we don't have to worry about that but if you are looking to do a water tank on the outside of your bus or if that's in your plans definitely definitely definitely worth remembering that on the flip side the height on the inside is definitely worth bragging about we put two inches of insulation in our floors and two inches of insulation in our ceiling and we have about six feet four inches of clearance right now i'm about 510 for reference so we have all this space do jumping jacks jump up and down and i haven't hit my head once so fourth thing to consider which is a huge plus of having a shuttle bus is how mechanic friendly they are so we find ourselves in certain situations having to call mechanics and when you tell them you have a conversion an rv a motorhome it can be hard to explain and they can deny you service but every time we said we had a shuttle bus a 40 for 50 shuttle bus they are willing to take you because they know how to work on it so that's a huge plus the fifth thing that you're definitely going to want to consider because this one was a huge shock for us during our build is that as far as we know and with our own personal experience shuttle buses do not have that metal sheet underneath the subfloor so if you watch conversion videos on youtube like we did we did a lot of how to's and everybody pulled up their sub floors and there was a nice metal sheet underneath we went to do that we pulled up our subfloor and we saw straight to the ground underneath it so we didn't have a metal sheet so something that you're going to want to consider is the condition of the wood that is going to be at the very bottom so to do that you can go under the bust when you're looking at it look up and that wood that you see is going to be the bottom piece of wood so if it's a good if it is in good condition like ours was you can just strip down to that part and build right on top of that another thing with that part of the conversion process is doing the walls and the ceiling in a shuttle bus for us was incredibly incredibly easy so really all we had to do was take these windows out and they're all individually screwed in you just pop this frame off and then you can take off the original walls that were there trace them and replace them which from what we've seen in bus conversion videos it's a lot harder because a they have rivets which are a pain to remove and b the window placement and the way that the metal is designed is much much harder so for us it was a simple swap same with the ceiling we just unscrewed everything took it out yeah there's a lot of screws but it's a lot better than there being a lot of rivets so keep that in mind so a sixth thing to consider which is probably one of my favorite things about shuttle buses are their windows they have huge big beautiful windows and they are a huge plus if you like them but if you're looking to cover them up unlike schoolies you're not going to be able to put that piece of metal on the outside due to the fiberglass body of the shuttle bus which means you would have to build off of the wall eating up a little bit of your interior space we did decide to keep all of them because i absolutely love them and we just covered them up with some extra insulation and some paint were needed and then capped them all open which is i love it so that is another thing to consider all right so the seventh thing that you're going to want to keep in mind is the engine we kind of touched on it earlier it is very mechanic friendly like we mentioned but another really good plus is it gets crazy good gas mileage um that was one of our biggest concerns before hitting the road is that we were gonna get like six miles to the gallon something like that because that's kind of things that we see a lot on social media and i'm not sure of the exact miles per gallon but if we fill her up we can honestly go about 400 to 450 miles before we have to get gas again so you can cover a lot of distance on one tank of gas the other thing is the actual durability of this engine i believe it is a 7.3 if i'm wrong i'm sure somebody will correct me in the comments but it is a diesel engine so it is essentially bulletproof and very very strong like i said earlier we got it at 149 000 miles and every single mechanic and even random people at gas stations that have talked to us have told us that this engine can go up to 500 000 miles so we'll be driving this baby for a long long time if we want so the last thing we want you to consider before starting your shuttle bus conversion or before buying one is the wheelchair lift this is our only door in the bus and that is intentional when we were looking for a shuttle bus we made sure it didn't had a wheelchair a lift or door or any kind of thing related to a wheelchair because we had seen that they are a nightmare to take out to deal with to fix and to just remove before you start your conversion so if you can we would suggest you avoid them but there's a lot of videos too in case you do end up with one okay guys that is the eight things that we could think of or the most important that we wanted to pass along as you are starting or curious about a shuttle bus conversion we had a lot of fun making this video um those are the 8 things we could think of if you want us to touch on any of them in more detail let us know in the comments if you want us to make another video like this let us know in the comments we have lots of adventures coming up and more fun and informative resources as well so make sure you subscribe to keep up to date with those and check out our website for more details we will see you next week see you then adios ciao

Channel: Growing Slow & Wild

Views: 63,504

Keywords: bus life, van life, van conversion, bus conversion, skoolie, skoolie conversion, shuttle bus, shuttle bus conversion, shuttle bus home, what to know before converting a bus, how to start bus life, how to convert a shuttle bus

Id: 5-WZEJ1wEg4

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020