The Project Continues...

[awalker1829]

Things will be getting busy at the shop. I went down today to road test the coach. Mechanics have sorted out all of the mechanical issues the coach had. Engine starts and stops with no difficulty. The coach ran fine, though I’d like to give it a longer road test sometime. Due to restrictions on the insurance policy, only the driver is permitted in the coach when being driven.

The coach will be busy the weekend of St. Patrick’s Day. That Saturday it goes to the train station for Tucson’s annual Silver Spike event and it is in the St. Patrick’s Day parade on Sunday. We got invited by the organizers, so I wasn’t going to turn that down.

After that it goes in the shop to get sign frames added and the Masonite interior panels repaired/replaced and painted. This will require the removal of seats, which will get cleaned and coated with lacquer. We should send the driver’s seat out for reupholstering then. It’s the only upholstered seat in the bus-the rest are fiberglass.

[Junk Yard Dog]

Pictures?

[awalker1829]

I’ll add them as the work progresses.

[awalker1829]

We’ve gotten to the stage of starting the work on the interior of the coach now.


I had a couple of our high school interns assist with the removal of the seats. They are tagged, so we know what location they go in when the interior work is done. I took this photo while removing damaged Masonite panels that will be replaced. The work program calls for the replacement of the damaged panels and repainting the Masonite panels with a spray on speckled paint that is close to the original interior paint that the coach had. The paint is a special order and won’t arrive until next month. We need to replace the aisle and step flooring and will try to work that in, since the seats are out. The green paint will not be touched as is is generally in good condition and is the original paint. The graffiti will be left alone as well. The box on the floor is the rear electric heater.


Some of the seats removed from the coach. Once the interior is done, the seats will go back in. While they’re out of the bus, they’ll get attention as well. They’ll get a good washing and a fresh coat of clear varnish at the minimum. The sign frames for the exterior advertising signs are on order and will be installed as well. The first seat that will go back in is the rear bench seat-it has three pieces that have to be bolted together before remounting it.

[millman]

[steelbuttplate]

Willie Nelson would give you $1,000,000 for that.

[awalker1829]

The neat thing is, Old Pueblo Transit No. 132 is still around-not for sale but when the owner dies, we’ll be looking at it. It was sent to the same RV dealer as 135 but was bought by a realtor who was marketing a development. It was repainted and used to give tours to prospective buyers. Only mechanical difference is it has the optional rear doors.

[millman]

Have you all got a lift like this? This is supposedly in Louisville KY in the 40s.

[awalker1829]

No. Don’t need one and there is a tour coach operator here that we can talk to if we need to put a coach on a lift. They have a hydraulic lift that has four independent units slaved together to a master controller. They can move it around the shop as needed. Also, one of our members owns a shop that works on commercial motor vehicles and he owns a similar lift. He also has a vintage Freightliner and trailers that he drives to vintage commercial motor vehicle shows.

This Saturday we’ll be working on installing the left and right side exterior sign frames. Then we need to sand the seats (fiberglass) in preparation for sealing with a high quality automotive lacquer.

[Longcolt44]

Have you put outbids to see who gets to do the period correct graffiti on it yet? No gang signs just things like "Jimmy + Sally forever or Jimmy + Ruth forever", Jimmy was a busy guy.

[awalker1829]

Have you put outbids to see who gets to do the period correct graffiti on it yet? No gang signs just things like "Jimmy + Sally forever or Jimmy + Ruth forever", Jimmy was a busy guy.

The graffiti is already there. It’s been there since the 1970s.

[awalker1829]

Latest update:


The drivers side sign frame was installed last Saturday. We installed it first as it was the most complicated one to put on due to the emergency door. Due to the fact that the top rail had to be mounted directly over a long row of riveting, we had to machine spacers for both side sign frames. It took me and our machinist over three hours to do that one sign frame.


This Saturday we installed the curb side and rear sign frames. These went much faster as very little modification work was needed.


The rear sign was simple work as pilot holes had been drilled in the correct locations some weeks ago. All we had to do was ream them out. We did have to grind the screw heads down and bevel some surfaces to permit the sign to be slid into place.

All of the sign frames are correctly positioned, the locations having been determined by referencing photos of 135 taken in the 1970s.

Now that the external work is largely finished, it’s time to get started on the interior with cleaning and preparing the seats for finishing.

[ffuries]

Wow, looking good. I enjoy the updates on this, it's cool looking at the pictures and seeing how far it has come.

[awalker1829]

Progress has been temporarily disrupted on account of a need to vacate a yard where we had been permitted to store equipment. The previous part owner (one of our members) died and his share of the property was bought out by the partner. They worked with us to provide us a reasonable amount of time to vacate. We are fortunate that our main yard has sufficient space to store the equipment and have moved all but two of the buses and a trolley car body which will be scrapped on site this week. The buses will be removed to the other yard by week’s end.

Today was spent towing a Yellow Coach.



Moving this coach required a bit of work due to where it was parked and the fact that it has no steering wheel. It was chained to the forklift for maneuvering in the yard so that we could assemble our heavy duty tow bar and use the deuce and a half to pull it out.



The heavy duty tow bar broken down. This tow bar is designed to attach to an axle of the vehicle being towed. The two bars with the black bases connect to the axle. The other bars connect everything to the yoke (standing on end). The holes in the bars are where the pins are placed. Each pair of pins is welded together at the top to a steel bar. Fully assembled, the tow bar weight is approximately 500 pounds. This means that the tow bar has to be assembled and disassembled on site, which takes about a half hour. Necessary hardware is kept in a dedicated toolbox and a hydraulic jack is always carried to assist with holding the yoke up while hitching the tow bar to the tow truck. The tow bar was designed and manufactured in house by our master machinist over a couple of months. The appearance of the bars are deceiving-every one of those bars is solid steel. The areas where one bar slides into another and the pins are inserted were all bored out on our machines. That bar will handle vehicles over 40,000 pounds.

[awalker1829]

And the project continues. Now that summer has past, we are working on treating the seats with fiberglass restorer and a protective clear coat. This means taking the seats off the bases and tagging the bases so that we know which one goes where. We will need to send the driver's seat out for reupholstering, as it is fabric. Once the seats are finished, we have to replace the damaged Masonite panels and paint them before we can reinstall the seats. The flooring also needs to be redone, but that might be a project for later. First we have to locate the correct pattern. That might be easier said than done.

In other news, we just installed a lift for our automobile shop program. This will aid in the work of getting donated cars and trucks ready for resale. Now we just need space for a lift for the buses!

[Junk Yard Dog]

There is a guy with a youtube channel who travels the country fixing old bus's, he works out of a 1948 grayhound bus like the one in Erik's lift picture, I watch him to pick up tips on dealing with Detroit Diesels as we are using two of them. He does a lot of bus work, mechanical mostly, lots of converted RV's . Busgreasemonkey

https://www.youtube.com/user/avonpicturethis

[awalker1829]

There is a guy with a youtube channel who travels the country fixing old bus's, he works out of a 1948 grayhound bus like the one in Erik's lift picture, I watch him to pick up tips on dealing with Detroit Diesels as we are using two of them. He does a lot of bus work, mechanical mostly, lots of converted RV's . Busgreasemonkey

https://www.youtube.com/user/avonpicturethis

I’ve seen his videos-pretty neat stuff. We have two buses in the collection that were converted into RVs.


The bus on the left was built for Navi-Hopi Tours of Flagstaff Arizona. It is a 1947 Spartan coach. In the 1970s, it was bought and converted into an RV by the man who had been the chief engineer for Spartan when the coach was built. After he died, it was donated by the family and transported back from Montana on a private semi owned by one of our members.


This bus is a former Sun Valley commuter coach from Phoenix. It was also refitted as an RV.

Both coaches will be repainted in their original liveries but both will be retained in their RV configuration. That allows us to provide on site housing for volunteers as needed as well as field quarters if we need to do a complicated on site retrieval of a bus.

[awalker1829]

Got some updating to do. We’re spending the winter working on the interior of the coach. All of the Masonite panels have been replaced and we are now masking the interior for painting.


Here we see one of our volunteers masking the interior of the cab.


Here you see masking that has been applied to the bottom of the aluminum window frames to protect the exterior paint from overspray. The windows will be closed when we paint.


Here’s a interior shot.

Since these photos were taken, the windows have been masked off with plastic sheeting and the edges of the floor masked off in preparation for covering it with paper. We are probably only a couple of weekends away from painting. Once the interior is painted, we will resume work on the fiberglass seats. Sometime in the future we will replace the flooring in the aisle and cab-it needs replacement badly. Then this project will done and I can move on to the next one.

[Junk Yard Dog]

Coming along nicely

[SA1911a1]

So, when you moved it, why didn't you just call the big tow truck?