Bus Inspection: Eagle Edition

[Music] so a little something different for me today i actually got to go do a bus inspection on a 1970 model 5 eagle bus um i thought i'd share it with you because i actually own an eagle bus and i thought if you were ever going to go look at one there might be some things to take into consideration before you buy it this particular customer that is purchasing this bus lives about 1300 miles away from where it's located and he doesn't want to fly out there and then find out that it's not in good condition at least not in good enough condition for him to buy so he hired me to go check it out and kind of a backstory with this thing is that the current owners really don't know how to get it started and it has a generator they're not sure if it runs or they're not really sure how to start it so i'm going to go there and kind of put the puzzle pieces together on this and then just get everything operating for this guy so he can drive it home and feel safe while doing so i finally got the damn thing running listen to this it needs to warm up and get all you know circulate that fuel and everything so but uh it's running man so my first task as i said was to get the bus started um after about four hours of chasing down bad grounding issues with the replacement batteries replaced a couple negative terminals and cleaned off a little bit of rust and hooking up an additional 200 amps of cranking power from a charger i was able to create a better contact for the batteries and then once we pulled the bus outside we actually found out the real issues and there was a whole other battery on the back side actually on the driver's side of the bus that was so old they didn't even have one volt in it it was actually creating higher another issue for draining power while i was trying to start the bus so i've been looking for the brake release on this bus and there's usually a couple places it's located normally it's located on the dash or on the side panel by the windows over there or it's even on the floor usually right here and i left all around the floor but i could never find it and so i've been trying all these combinations flipping all these switches and but finally behind this piece of vinyl on the seat i found the brake release and even now you can see we're covered up by the seat i don't know if you can see that back there but once i air the seat up you'll be able to see it so i found it we're gonna get this thing fired back up we're gonna get pulled outside and get a sunlight picture of this thing hopefully i don't need any jumps from the battery booster so just another quirky thing you got to look out for i've spent about 20 minutes looking for a step release to bring the step up and some of them were operated by a toggle switch most of the time and i thought with this guy and his creativity maybe he hooked up some sort of automatic release whenever you put it into gear or release the brakes uh finally i crawled down underneath to see if there was still an airline or an electrical line and he just fabricated a sliding tray with bungee cords on it pretty simple all right so been battling with the generator not really battling just trying to figure out where the generator battery was how it ran i come to find out this inverter battery was the battery they used to start the generator see running another win uh now i got the generator it's been running for about five minutes it sounds like it's about to die which if that's the case [Music] turn this off for now because of where the bus is located what i found was that this this controlled the this is the generator battery and it's also the inverter battery and the inverter is working uh i don't know what the inverter's not hooked up other than uh the dc lines are actually going to the battery we have a main power disconnect we have a transfer switch and then we have another panel a lot of handles so there's three panels over here and then there's an additional panel over on the other side for the main power in and it's divided to a 20 to 30 amp breaker switch that's how these projects are people just uh like this this is uh i don't know if it's wired into anything or not but that's just kind of the stuff that you know you have uh some people get to where they're 90 done on their project they call it good so i love these cafe hinges they are perfect for these buses they actually hold the doors upright like this and you're not really ever gonna take your head off [Music] there you go so it's got a frame and then an l bracket and it connects to where your strut is going to be and then there's a guide arm so it's really a pretty simple design and then you have a another square bar that comes over here and does the same thing i don't know what the exact measurements are but that's a pretty simple design if you ever want to do it are the things you need to look out for whenever you own an eagle bus let's start on the outside so originally it was a it was 1970 which i think were either and i think they were o5 models but he took off the cap redid all the work and put a model 15 cap on it now what a model 15 is is it's actually a 102 inch wide body so you're wider and you're taller than the stock so that's what a factory roof raise would look like it's about a eight inch addition on the on the front there so it's great for head room inside and insulating this bus sounds really good going down the road and the suspension so let's look at the suspension typically you want 12 to 14 inches of clearance right here um and then again you can see how much fender wheel clearance you got there over your tires and what you need to know about the torso elastic suspension is that you want to look at where the suspension is sitting and how much adjustment you have left this one is at a really good ride height and it's it's standing really strong but lots of times when you don't have that amount of clearance now the shocks are leaking so obviously the shocks need to be replaced and under here [Music] not a lot of rust or peeling on the metal for your adjustment side of things there's a bolt a giant bulk on an arm this right here is where you want to look so this is the adjustment bolt and there's about three to four inches of adjustment left in this and that arm swings out to the end of the bolt and once you come to the end of that bolt you have no more adjustment left but some areas you want to look out for right here and an eagle this is typically super super rusted out all right so continuing around the outside of the bus uh i needed to get the rear and show you the rear area another thing to look at here on the rear is that this is where eagles tend to really rust up bad and these gussets most of the times these get cut out people put gusset plates in because once these rust this actually pulls the frame pulls away from this side but again this suspension is in really good shape there's no not a lot of rust on that spring you can't see it great but um but again here this one's not in bad shape look at the adjustment and how much space they have left on the adjustment so this is a good example of the suspension being at its limits and not having any adjustment left if the bus was to sag anymore and it needed to be raised you would have to source a new spring or put air bags on it still a very expensive project all right so now that we've looked at the adjustment the other thing too to look at is that your caps were fiberglass and typically the fiberglass caps we call they call them rear and front caps and this one both of them have been replaced but on this particular model rather than riveting it on which they actually they did rivet on but then they came back with a body filler and used that to smooth out all of the rivet seams on the on the bus so this is where that's not a great idea over time with the heat and the vibration the bondo's not going to hold up and this is kind of this is what can happen so on some of your other eagle models that haven't been converted this to this degree um lots of times you'll have your rivets here like lots of times you'll have your rivets like this and on the body and on the body what you'll see [Music] typically around these areas here on this trim if you have a lot of bubbling in the paint um that's usually rust in the frame there's not a lot of that going on underneath the paint uh there's just a lot of the paint that's coming off and that's just you know one it's really hard to paint aluminum but man look at these tail lights they're almost they're almost clear in comparison to a lot of what other people have out there so a little bit of body work i mean look at these they're like they're like in mint condition you just don't see that but really really uh in good shape other than the you know the dated interior which that's that's all personal preference and then of course just getting the wire cleaned up on this this bus is going to be actually a pretty pretty solid rig the one other drawback i would say is that these motor models do not have power steering now when you're rolling that's pretty easy to deal with they turn everything is great but when you're at a dead stop and you're trying to back up and pull forward to do maybe a u-turn or just to get into a spot it's pretty difficult um this bus is really there's not much left to show other than um just kind of going you know going over things with the new owner uh and he's pretty excited to get the bus but i hope you enjoyed the video please like and subscribe

Channel: Rollin_Homies

Views: 16,888

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Id: RV_6-tObbgg

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022