The MOST PAINFUL Skoolie Mistakes (Skoolie Conversion Guide #7)

[Music] you just can't save them all can you no i'm not talking about school buses i'm talking about good-hearted folks like you and me who get into this lifestyle and then suddenly find themselves in way over their head i've been there i have and i've helped a lot other folks who've been there too i gotta be honest i couldn't save them all that's why i'm making today's video as someone who's been there and back again well more times than i can count and has 16 years of dealing with all the bs a bus can throw your way i wanted to make a video and share with you some of the most common mistakes i see folks make as they choose this lifestyle enter into it and then begin the conversion process a little bit of wisdom and forethought in advance can save a whole lot of time and money and heartbreak down the road so that's what i'm hoping with today's video i can take our hard-earned lessons pass them along and charge a little interest and maybe you'll get a lot of value out of it too so follow along i'm going to go over some of the biggest mistakes newbie schooly folks make so you can avoid them on your end thanks for tuning in here we go [Music] sounds good doesn't it just packing up hitting the auction buying a bus for three grand taking the seats out and living life you know i mean giving a big middle finger to your landlord freedom america that is dangerous thinking my friends because i'll be the first to tell you living in a bus ain't cheap i made this mistake myself back when i was 19 years old and lived in my first bus vastly underestimated the cost of maintenance fuel not to mention the fact that you never really do have a home once you pull out of that driveway but yeah it was all worth it sure but what does it cost to actually live and enjoy life in a school bus a lot more than you might imagine for starters let's talk about the price of a bus it just isn't the case that you can buy a good running school bus for three or four thousand dollars anymore sure the odd deal comes up every now and again especially for those of us intrepid enough to hop on the auctions and take a chance buying a bus that we've never seen but the majority of the time you're going to be buying a bus from maybe a second party to own it after the school district or even a dealer and once you start getting into that zone i tell folks if you want something good running that's not going to be a money pit you got to be prepared to spend at least eight to ten thousand dollars especially if it's a shorter size bus because well those are all the rage moving on from the bus let's talk about the build out i mean in the past two years we've seen material prices and some instances triple i know what i'm buying for a hundred bucks and steal today would have been 30 bucks before the pandemic after you get through the build out and all the time and energy and money it takes to do that and you finally do hit the road in all its glory you're probably going to be encountered with some type of mechanical failure in your first 3 000 miles it's just the odds and i tell folks if you pull a bus into a heavy duty diesel repair shop you're not going to leave there without spending a thousand bucks it's basically a guarantee heck i've spent six thousand dollars in a mechanic shop fixing up a bus that had no problems it's pretty expensive you gotta ask what did they fix you know so then you're out there on the open road and life is good and it is good you are just slaying those miles lots of smiles yup but then it's time for new tires and a new set of tires on a school bus is an easy three thousand dollars you got six of them and each one if you want something reputable is gonna be about 500 bucks installed yikes if you get into this lifestyle thinking you're going to be saving money or living for free i got bad news for you because it's expensive quite expensive sometimes when was last time you got on a bus and it was free i mean come on buying a bus is really the cheapest part of the whole experience it's like buying a ticket to like the world's most expensive ride well unless you're riding when those billionaires are rocking to space i think those are more expensive but anyways you get where i'm going with this buying a bus getting it gutted and moving into it that's not gonna be the thing that ends your party it's gonna be a blown engine in the middle of who knows where when the mechanic hands you a bill for twenty thousand dollars and said hey if you want to get your house back on the road this is what you owe me and i've seen that happen before and to be honest it could happen to any of us so you got to be on board with that and you got to be prepared to deal with the consequences of that should it happen boy the clear coat on that roof really is it's peeling okay so maybe you haven't followed my advice and still think that living this way is a good bet for you nice welcome to the club the next thing i want to talk about is a little condition i called but i love it and that's what happens when you go out and start looking at buses because it's so easy to fall in love with the bus especially if you're anything like this guy right here like this bus i'm leaning up against why'd i buy it i don't know it's a 74 gmc with the 350 v8 underpowered pretty rusty the tires are shot um gets hopefully you know three miles per gallon two on the highway somehow it goes down a lot i don't get it oh and the breaks have never worked right even though i've spent about a thousand bucks trying to fix them anyway i fell in love with it and i was blinded by my love and that's what caused me to make some pretty irrational choices anyway look i know it's tempting especially if you're out there with somebody in a bus has a whole lot of character or personality and you just want to snatch it up you know but you got to make sure you keep your thinking hat on and stay rational because like the bus behind me it might be full of soul and character might have a sweet personality but the truth is you need something that's gonna be rock solid so let's assume you walk up to look at a bus and you got your level head on you're not gonna fall in love at first glance and you start browsing around all of a sudden you realize you have no idea what you're looking at oh boy that is tough well it gets really tricky when we're talking about drive trains for the uneducated consumer because the truth is you could have a bluebird with a chevy a thomas with a cummins or an international with an international and you have no idea what that all means and that's fine for now but as soon as you start walking around with money in your pocket earmarked for a bus purchase you better darn well what you know what you're signing up for the bus behind me has an international t444e which is by some accounts a fantastic motor not my favorite but honestly that's just my opinion and that motor is going to leave its owner a lot happier than the one that followed it which was the vt365 also known as the ford 6.0 which is notorious for being very problem prone and expensive to bulletproof although once they're running they do really put out great power it's it's impressive but it can cost a pretty penny to get there and that's assuming you catch it before the bad thing happens which is really expensive to fix anyway what i'm trying to say is when you're going out there bus shopping come knowing what you're looking for have an engine in mind that you want to have or maybe a few engines that you really like you know a lot of folks are partial to the cummins and internationals i'm some of those people but some people swear by cats and i'll be honest with you i've had good experiences get out there know what you're looking for don't compromise on the most important aspects of your bus and to me that's going to be the engine and transmission let's talk about the elephant in the room or should i say the rust on the bus look i know it's tempting and i know it's hard to find buses that don't have rust especially if you live in the northeast or any of the rust belt states there but look would you just hear a guy out when i say there is no such thing as a good deal on a rusty bus like really no such thing as a good deal on a rusty bus i can't tell you how easy it is to just take your wallet out and throw money at rusty vehicles they just they seem to soak it up i don't know what it is the porosity of the oxidized iron mixes with the green dye and the bill i don't know i don't know how it but listen to me and take this to heart don't buy a rusty bus because i've done it and it's not fun this bus here she's rusty yeah and i bought her whoops and the bus that i bought in 2010 it was from michigan it was rusty yep i fought through it sure it was sad and i worked a lot harder than i wanted to just to get back to square one bummer but look when you're out there bus shopping either hold out and wait for one that isn't rusty or spend the extra money or be willing to travel to find one that is nice and clean because there's no way of stopping rust rust never sleeps i don't know if you've ever heard that but it never sleeps and we do sleep and that means that well just simple math you're gonna lose the battle against rust so don't start that fight all right it's a shame though i mean i really love rust i'm reminded actually of a bus that we did recently um that bus wasn't rusty but the client actually showed up with his own bus and uh i feel bad because he had spent about eight thousand dollars on this bus he bought it from florida and had it shipped up to my shop in denver and right away as i saw that bus getting unloaded off the flatbed trailer i could tell that it wasn't going to work because that thing was so rusty oh my god i mean the frame was shot there were holes in it and this poor guy had bought it without knowing where to look and knowing that that could be a real problem for him and so after getting on the phone with him and talking to him we decided the best way to move forward was actually to just sell that bus at a huge loss i mean he bought it for eight we sold it for 1800 and buy a new bus from here where rust isn't an issue and start from there because he was looking at spending at least ten thousand dollars just to get that bus up to a good starting point to be a foundation for a build um so we found him a bus locally it actually had lower miles better transmission and no rust uh for ten thousand dollars so happy-ish ending i mean he still spent a lot of money to learn that lesson so hopefully you don't have to pay the same way he did moving right along in the comedy of errors that can be buying a bus we gotta talk about tires tires are expensive and if you're looking at a bus in the three to four thousand dollar range keep in mind that a new set of tires is going to cost you as much as that bus is worth yikes right here look at this guy we got lots of cracking and checking this tire is older than i am maybe not but it's close well the tire on my right has plenty of tread plenty of life it's not cracked and that's going to save money for you right now and down the road i'm going to have to get a little bit serious with you on this one because it's a mistake that i see even professional bus builders doing who sell their services to other people and that mistake is leaving the interior skins in stock insulation on the bus and not taking out the stock floor and subfloor from a bus as someone who has lived in an stock insulated school bus and also one that is totally insulated you almost can't compare the two you almost can't except there's still a bus so i guess you can in this bus i've completely gutted it there are no interior ceiling panels there are no interior wall panels i even got rid of the stock school bus windows because those are leaky and awful i haven't yet demoed the floor but you better believe i'm going to and the reason is you got to get out all of that garbage fiberglass insulation odds are it's gonna be dirty it might even be moldy and i can guarantee you it's gonna underperform just about anything else you might put in its place in my case i will be doing spray foam insulation in this bus which has over double the r value per inch of thickness than fiberglass in addition to the fact that it adds structural rigidity to my whole unit not like it needs it and it also acts as a vapor barrier which is very important if you're going to be living breathing cooking showering inside a small confined space you want to make sure that any vapors moisture vapors that get into the air are dealt with in a way that keeps them from condensing on the steel skin of your bus another step you really can't skip is demoing the floor i've seen so many people again professional builders too choose to lay their floor right over the old existing subfloor that's bad news and it's bad news for one really big reason and that reason is rust as someone who used to run a bus company i can tell you that one of our favorite methods to clean out a bus when it was really really disgusting was to pull it up on blocks come with a hose in the front hose it down and let it drain out the back i said it and you can imagine even if the place you're buying it from didn't clean their buses that way maybe they just left the windows down or some of those snot-nosed kids with their snowy muddy boots tracked a lot of moisture in that moisture has nowhere to go but to soak and ruminate and just kind of like infuse itself with the subfloor we're sitting right up against the steel and that's going to cause rust i don't care how clean your bus is when you start you have no way absolutely no way of knowing the condition of your metal floor pan aside from tearing out the subfloor if you want to move forward with a build successfully not just gloss over any issues it might have you got to tear out that subfloor you got to get the rubber off you got to get the wood off if it has it look at that steel floor pan treat it paint it and then go from there look my last piece of advice here is one that's hard to give and that's because it has to do with the windows i mean who doesn't love all these windows i mean it's amazing one of my favorite things about a bus and aesthetically i mean it's what makes a school bus a school bus it's also what makes a school bus really hard to live in full time these windows well great for you know housing a dump truck full of kids are miserable to live with they leak they're designed to be replaced easily by any mechanic and the trade-off for that is when the wind blows you feel it inside when the air is cold out here it's cold in there and the worst part of all is that this nasty little horrible design means that they almost always end up leaking inside even if you've gone to the trouble of pulling every window out cleaning it and then resealing it with your favorite sealant of choice i've seen it all in fact one of my favorite clients had a bus where they opted to keep the first four windows on each side and one day he calls me up and says charlie i got mushrooms growing out of my balls and he wasn't kidding me he sent me the photos there were mushrooms growing out the side of his walls because the stock school bus windows that we tried to talk him out of which he ended up keeping were actually leaking water into his walls now thank god we use closed cell spray foam insulation because that water had nowhere to go other than to soak into the plywood for the wall and sit there so he brought his bus in we removed the old bus window skinned over this side put in new rv windows pulled off the rotten plywood hit the whole place with bleach and vinegar and then we're able to move forward with just a new wall panel and some new windows so it's an easy fix but the point is your build if you leave the stock bus windows you might not be so lucky and it might be many months or years before you realize that you've had mold or worse growing in your walls poisoning you oh it pains my heart but i gotta be honest there is just no way i would ever willingly live full time in a bus with stock windows because it's just too big of a risk it's another thing that i see a lot of professional builders out there choosing to leave behind and in my opinion that's just not a responsible thing to do for your clients unless you totally educate them on all the ways it could go wrong it doesn't save you money in the long run it's too bad because i really love them i really do it just it makes it for me but it also breaks it for me [Music] well i hope i didn't scare you away listen all the ways a bus conversion can go wrong before you even get started on the build out but the truth is there are a lot of ways it can go south on you and i wanted to save you the stress and fear of walking through that minefield as someone who's done it on their own before the existence of videos like this i can tell you there's nothing worse than that feeling of recognizing that you've made a terrible mistake and the only way to fix it is by spending a lot of time a lot of money or both the point of today's video was to spare you my friends and viewers from having that realization for yourself as a man much wiser than me once said we're never going to survive unless we get a little crazy [Music] thanks for watching today's video if you found it interesting or informative make sure you hit that subscribe button and if you didn't make sure you hit that subscribe button we'll see you next week happy busting are you kidding me [Music] damn i just love the way these old buses smell we're getting serious i don't care what you're saying they just don't make them like this anymore you know [Music] bow get out of here [Music] no we're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy i really love rust you know like rusty can trust rust or bust ashes to ashes rust to dust oh it gets dark doesn't it [Music] you

Channel: Chuck Cassady

Views: 58,997

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Id: budQDgs1CIs

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Mon May 23 2022