BusBuilding

Knowing how to drill steel is a skill only learned by doing. As one who has not reached any serious competency yet, this dialog confirmed my seat-of-the-pants experience…

DrDave:

Run the bit at a speed and pressure until just shy of smoking or turning blue.

Stan:

I think you have found the ideal speed from a lot of experience drilling holes. For an inexperienced person that is the equivalent of ‘tighten the bolt until it breaks and then back off a quarter turn’. If you don’t have some ballpark idea of the correct speed before you start, you either ruin a drill bit or make very slow progress.

Then getting serious, Stan adds:

Figure on 100 feet per minute cutting mild steel. Calculate the circumference of the bit in feet and divide by two (a bit has two cutting flutes) times the RPM of the drill. A few caculations will give you some idea of how fast to run your drill with different size bits.

And DrDave concludes:

If you are getting more than 20 holes on a bit, It’s a good Day!!

[Bus Conversions Forum]

Huh. Tighten a bolt till it breaks then back off. What a comedian.

How quickly we fall out of love…

A few weeks ago I was in a quandary about where all the books in my home would go if/when I go fulltiming.

Hundreds of books. Stressing about which to take and which beloved books would have to be bid a wistful farewell.

In order to move just one of the several bookcases from the house to the coach, the entire thing would have to be unloaded - an ongoing postponed task.

Once it was emptied and transferred to the coach, secured and ready to populate with all these ‘beloved’ books, I found I didn’t want any of them there! I don’t want all those crusty books on philosophy, self-improvement, finance, corporate management and blaa blaa blaa. Eeww. Yuck.

I’m starting a new chapter, not rehashing the old!

Hmmm….what to put on the shelves, then?

Why, books on bus conversions, from Ben’s
rv-busconversions of course!


PS: Notice the slanted shelves? Hah! Thought I overlooked that one, did you?

Madden goes three for three with a new MCI E4500 Cruiser: John Madden’s MCI® E4500 Cruiser has been a familiar sight at NFL games and other events for years, and Madden’s third MCI has now taken its place. More luxurious than ever, with even more electronic gadgets and creature comforts, it continues to sport the familiar Outback restaurant logo.

George Myers, a respected authority in the bus conversion world and publisher of Coach-Builder’s Bulletin, writes, in an article on Window Systems Analysis in the November, 2006 issue of Bus Conversions Magazine:

By covering the window openings and installing RV windows, the look of the coach is usually changed significantly from how it looked as a bus. Some people have told me how well I changed my bus so that it now looks just like a motorhome. I have to explain why this is not a compliment.

Now motorhome owners, don’t get all huffy, ok? Some of us bus owners get quite a few askance looks from the factory-built crowd, so if ya’ll can’t respect us, can’t we at least get a little for ourselves?!

Until I get a chance to update the site again, how ’bout an artsy photo at the top?

Don’t have the amperage needs to require it yet, but if one is going to $pend dollar$$$ for good battery cable, one might want to consider getting the best. This is for the house battery system, but I used the same thing for the bus batteries. Hundreds of amps throughput.

YEAH Baby! Bring on those Amps!