Why We Bought a Shuttle Bus and NOT A School Bus For Our Bus Conversion-Ep. 48

[Music] [Music] what's up everybody welcome back to another episode for those of you who are new here my name is johnny this is our bus miles of smiles unfortunately reagan's not here today but we got an exciting and different episode coming for you today today we're talking all about shuttle buses obviously we've got a nice specimen right here but uh we didn't know what we were going to end up with when we started our search so we wanted to make a video to tell you guys all about how we ended up with this shuttle bus why we ended up with this shuttle bus why we didn't buy school bus and why you maybe want to consider buying a shuttle bus too there's a lot to take into consideration when you do buy your bus this is just going gonna be a breakdown of why we specifically bought a shuttle bus down the road we'll probably put out some more content specific to shuttle buses different types of shuttle buses things like that but for today we're going to talk about our unique situation why we like this one and why we're excited to get it on the road so without further ado let's go ahead and talk about some pros and cons of shuttle buses before we get started let's talk about shuttle buses in general really quick so what we have here is a international 3400 chassis with an eldorado coach on it so the people that make the chassis and the people that make the actual bus part are two different companies uh unlike many school buses which are pretty much the chassis maker is the maker of the bus i believe uh shuttle buses oftentimes almost always have a chassis manufacturer and then they have the coach manufacturer so ours is international makes chassis el dorado makes the coach but there's ford chassis there's chevy chassis there's i think even freightliner chassis um and so there are definitely lots of variations of shuttle buses out there just like there's a lot of variations of buses but potentially maybe even more variations because there are so many combinations of combined manufacturers so shuttle buses come in a few different shapes and sizes the smaller sized shuttle buses are typically built on ford van chassis uh or chevy van chassis so this is ford e350 e450 uh and chevy i think 2500 3500 don't quote me on that but small van chassis these are going to sit way lower to the ground they're going to have that short nose to them uh and overall probably not be as long then there's also shuttle buses that are built on a medium duty chassis which is what this shuttle bus is typically uh these are chassis that are a bit more beefed up closer to that of a big truck or like a semi almost not quite that big these type of chassis can handle more weight and typically are going to be on the longer end of the shuttle buses because those are the buses that really need the beefed up chassis the beefed up uh weight restrictions and also uh just the ability to handle the overall weight that's going to be thrown at it so like the smaller van chassis ford has their f series line f450 550 chassis chevy has their line uh i believe it's kodiak chassis so it's like a chevy 5500 6500 chassis and then international also has shuttle buses as well as freightliner there may be some other manufacturers out there that are missing but those are the main chassis manufacturers when it comes to medium duty shuttle bus chassis so like i said shuttle buses come in all different shapes and sizes different manufacturers but for us this was really the one because it was a beefed up chassis it was long we're at 32 feet bumper to bumper and because of that beefed up chassis and overall length we had tons of room but also we have the durability and power to be able to handle all of that and we didn't have to worry in the build about weight restrictions or worrying about if we're going to be getting close to the gvwr which is your maximum gross weight so for us the medium duty chassis shuttle bus was the way to go rather than the band chassis all right so let's jump right into it with our first pro and here it is you're looking at it right here that is interior height uh i'm six one and i've got a lot of family members who are six three six four even up to six six and for me i wanted to be comfortable and i also wanted other taller people to be comfortable in the bus i didn't want people to have to be shrinking down and i wanted to also feel myself like i could really stand up in this space and be comfortable so we have about an inch and a half of spray foam in the ceiling inch and a half of foam in the subfloor so we've got about two inches of additional height in the subfloor and then we brought the ceiling down probably about an inch and a half to two inches and we've still got probably i'd say about six six of head room we don't know the exact number plenty plenty of headroom now if you look at the school bus side of things most school buses i believe are six feet or less and if you're lucky you find one that's six four maybe a little bit higher but that's about all they top out at so for us roof rays would have been in order because we wanted this bus to be well insulated so school bus was really off the table for us the reason shuttle buses are often times higher is shuttle buses are meant for adults school buses are meant for children children i mean certainly there are some tall kids out there but for the most part kids are gonna be under six foot or way under six foot now there's plenty of adults who are taller so overall shuttle buses have taller construction so for us shuttle buses were the go to all right next pro on the list for us is actually the body construction now i'm not talking about the actual construction and structure of the bus we'll come to that later because that may not be exactly on the pro side but i'm talking about the fact that this is a fiberglass bus school buses almost exclusively are made of steel they are metal bodied bus they're built like tanks but with that metal comes a lot of weight also with that metal is the necessity to be able to work with metal if you do need to work in something patch something or do anything to the body for us fiberglass is a great option because a it's way lighter and b it's way easier to work with for me i felt very comfortable laying some fiberglass mat some fiberglass resin playing with bondo it's much easier than learning how to weld or doing metal work so for me it was a lot easier to work on a fiberglass bust now that being said some people hate fiberglass don't want to work with fiberglass want nothing to do with it but just again for me my preference was i want to be able to work on the body if something happens or something is going bad now on that note fiberglass bus is not going to rust now the frame will rest and the things underneath and all the metal components underneath will rust but the body of your of your bus is not going to rust fiberglass does not rust certainly it can you know i'm sure degrade over time but that being said it's not going to rust there aren't going to be rust holes showing up in here obviously we've had our fair share of rust underneath that we've dealt with but the body of the bus itself is not going to rust now like i mentioned buses are made of steel and steel is heavy fiberglass not so much so this bus here is going to have a lot lower weight than a comparable school bus of its same size for example our friends at school we live in their bus weighs over i believe 23 000 pounds or around there and there's a 28 foot bus this bus as it sits i would guess weighs probably around 10 twelve thousand pounds maybe and that's a total guesstimate our overall uh maximum weight rating is twenty one thousand pounds but again i don't see us getting there now what does a lower overall weight mean it means you're gonna get better gas mileage and you're going to get more out of your motor so our same motor in this bus a bus a school bus of the same size is going to weigh more but probably be slower probably struggle more because it does weigh more it's going to be you know dragging around more weight so for us not only is the fiberglass construction lighter and easier to work with but that lightness also comes with some other pros as well now i should quick mention before we move on to the next one not all shuttle buses are fiberglass construction there are some that have metal bodies but for the most part these especially these ones like uh early 2000s and into the 2000s a lot of them are fiberglass bodies some of the newer ones i believe are more switching to metal bodies more often aluminum bodied or things like that but ours and the reason we picked this one was the fiberglass body all right so on to the next pro didn't even mean to do that but i just did uh and the next pro being extra storage now again prefacing this by saying not all shuttle buses have this extra garage space but a lot of them do and it's very easy to find ones that do kind of alluding to earlier shuttle buses are often meant for adult events or maybe it's an airport shuttle or something that is going to require extra baggage and things like that well a lot of shuttle buses have a true garage area and that's exactly what we have here so from the side of our bus you can see our back window ends about here and then there's a wall somewhere along here and this back couple of feet is not only just pure storage that was behind a wall but it's also dropped down about a foot so we have tons of storage space nice extra garage we're gonna have bikes back here we've obviously got all of our electrical back here not sure if you can see that but this garage space was huge for us now a lot of buses obviously do have back doors they have handicapped doors some shuttle buses have handicapped doors too but oftentimes they're at the same level or just enter into the whole existing other space of the bus this is a completely separate space that's actually again like i mentioned drop down so we get even more space overall back here for us this has allowed us to have a huge closet it's going to allow us to store our bikes inside instead of outside and just overall giving us a ton of storage space that's completely separated from the rest of the bus all right and we've got one more pro before we're going to talk about some of the bad sides of shuttle buses and that this last pro is the overall look of shuttle buses so obviously this is a shuttle bus from the early 2000s but some of you maybe rode to prom or uh you know have been on a party bus before and they're a little bit better looking than your average school bus so this is a little bit speculative on my my part but i have a feeling that our shuttle bus will have a little bit easier of a time getting into some of those picky rv parks that maybe don't want buses in there it just overall looks a little bit more i don't know not so busy and certainly there's some that look more busy and and less bussy but we're trying to stay a little low-key you know that's why you paint your door a bright orange i have a pretty good feeling that it doesn't stick out like a huge sore thumb obviously it's a bus but in my opinion shuttle buses tend to look a bit more sleek than school buses and just stand out a little less as obviously a bus hey guys a little change up of camera here i'm here with regan drinking some beers editing this video and i realized i forgot one very important important pro and that is regan the windows yes the windows the windows are a very important pro for us they're just bigger they let in more light of course that comes with downsides of trying to insulate it trying to keep the temperature controlled but for us shuttle bus windows once we saw them and how big they were it was like man we got to have it so i would say though a con for the shuttle bus windows i love them it's probably my favorite part but that you can you can only open the top like a little bit so it's just the slide at the top that you open you can't like bring them down or anything so like our dogs can't stick their heads out the window if they wanted to good point it's a good point but still worth it yes still definitely worth it uh small opening big window big window wins so just had to hop in one other pro all right so now that we've talked about some of the pros the shuttle buses it wouldn't be fair how this ground is hot it wouldn't be fair to talk to not talk it wouldn't be fair to not talk about some of the cons so here we go now we just talked about some of that sleekness of the shuttle bus look and oftentimes they just look sleeker and look a little nicer well that comes with a little bit of a downside as well as you can see under here or hopefully you can see there's not a whole lot of ground clearance here or over by our entry door some may have higher ground clearance than ours some may have lower ground clearance than ours but either way shuttle buses overall are going to have probably lower high ground clearance than a bus now why is this important all those dirt roads you want to go on all those blm roads all the places you want to go see well some of those might require you to have higher ground clearance than others and shuttle buses may not allow for that now ours here is what's considered a medium duty chassis so it's not like the ford van chassis the e350 chassis things like that it's a little bit more beefed up and it sits a little bit higher so we have a little bit of an advantage there but still i believe we have lower ground clearance than a lot of school buses it is what it is but i think we're going to still get plenty of places that we want to go all right let's talk about another cotton and this one kind of ties back into one of the pros like i said earlier we talked about how this is a fiberglass bus and that's great and all but that fiberglass bus doesn't have quite the structure that a normal bus would like i also mentioned earlier shuttle buses are meant for adults school buses are meant for kids for whatever reason we value the safety of our kids a lot more and so we build school buses like tanks this while it's a big vehicle and it's built pretty solidly it's not built like a tank it probably is not going to react the same way it gets hit by another car or a bad truck fiberglass is going to probably crumple a lot quicker than metal is and that's also because there isn't quite the structure built into these shuttle buses that there is with school buses the school buses have metal ribbing throughout the solid metal hatch or these big steel hat channels and while some shuttle buses will have those many of them have pretty minimalized uh structure within them to keep the weight down so that weight savings while it is a good thing uh can also be a bad thing if you're really looking for something that's gonna be as strong as a school bus uh shuttle buses most often are not gonna be as strong as a school bus we still feel good and safe riding in this thing it's a big vehicle and i don't think we're gonna roll it over so i don't think we need to worry about any rollover strength and as you've seen in our videos we've beefed up a lot of this metal in here beefed up the walls partially because we had to because things were so rusted out but also uh you know makes us feel a little bit better about what's behind these walls now and how it would react if we were in side impact or things like that so yes fiberglass shuttle buses while they are lighter and whatnot that comes at a little bit of a cost with safety so maybe if you have kids or something like that maybe that's something to consider but again like i said in most situations you drive safe your vehicle is probably still going to come out the winner because this is much bigger than a lot of other vehicles out there on the road all right and i'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up with what's probably not a huge con but as a con maybe to some people and that is shuttle buses don't come in quite as many variations now before people are being rating in the comments of course there's tons of variations of manufacturers and things like that but what i'm talking about is this is a dog-nosed bus meaning the engines in the front here but shuttle buses don't often come in flat nose front engine and flat nose rear engine options like a school bus does there are certainly transit buses out there that have rear engine designs not so many front engine designs but transit buses overall can't get very many places because they're meant to be very low to the ground ride around in cities you know sink down for wheelchair access things like that so i'm not really wrapping transit buses into this conversation um but shuttle buses specifically really you're only going to find them in a front engine design i don't mind and part of the reason we went with this shuttle bus specifically was because it was a nose bus but it was not a van chassis bus this is a truck chassis so this is a like i mentioned medium duty chassis meaning we have a big open area right here to access anything we want to work on unlike the e350 e450 kind of van chassis shuttle buses those shuttle buses that engine is crammed in a short hood and it's really hard to access things you can there's access panels from the inside and things like that but overall it's way harder to work on so for us having this completely open and the engine sitting in front of the cab was really important and again a big reason we went with this bus ah all right guys so that is gonna be it for this video hopefully this was an informational video and kind of took you guys through some of the reasons we were looking at shuttle buses and some of the reasons you maybe want to consider shuttle buses even though schooly is technically a school bus uh i guess ours is just considered a bus conversion i don't know if we can really call it a schoolie tell me what you think in the comments can you call a shuttle bus conversion a schoolie when it was never really used for school purposes although ours was used to haul around church school kids so maybe we have a in in there um but uh guys if you found this video informational in any way go ahead and give us a like and go ahead and subscribe we want to put out more informational content like this in the midst of all of our build videos but also let us know what you'd want to know more information about like i mentioned earlier i got a really in-depth shuttle bus video that i want to do for you guys i'm going to do a ton of research go through a little bit more in depth about the different chassis options about the different body manufacturers and things like that so you guys can have a really good grasp on what's available in the shuttle bus world because for me i think they're an amazing option oftentimes they're not more expensive than school buses sometimes they can be but i think they're a great option especially for mainly interior headroom and people who are tall guys if you have any comments uh about what i said in this video maybe other pros and cons that you see to a shuttle bus let's get some discussion going below for um other people who are coming to this video for uh information about shuttles versus school buses things like that and let's just get a good thread going below for some information for those kind of people who are still on the hunt for their dream bus but for now go ahead and subscribe see what we're doing with this beautiful shuttle bus and what we're gonna do with it when we take it on the road uh reagan's gonna be here in a little while and we're gonna get working away and hopefully complete our kitchen today uh well kind of complete the kitchen uh and that would be next week's video for you guys it's it's turning out amazing and i can't wait to show you guys uh all the little touches that we've got and just though you'll start to get a feel for all the design that we're going for so that's to come i'm gonna get to work on editing this and get it out to you guys but thank you for watching guys and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Miles O'Smiles

Views: 74,484

Keywords: Shuttle Buses, Bus Conversion, Shuttle vs. Skoolie

Id: Y-csHLJKTMA

Length: 21min 20sec (1280 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021