BusBuilding

We bus converters have a long, lonely road sometimes. Well, all the time, it seems. It’s one thing to design and build things yourself that are in your control, but when one has to start interfacing with component manufacturers and RV dealers, the road can become rather trying. It seems that the entire RV industry is geared toward the supply chain. Manufacturers make stuff, sell it to a distributor, which sells it to a dealer, which sells & installs it for the end customer. And many customers don’t even get the chance to figure out if what they’re being sold is right for them.

…the entire RV industry is geared toward the supply pipeline…

Neither manufacturers nor dealers give the customer much to go on to specify their products, and I guess most dealers figure out how to install stuff as they go along. With the research I’d already done, I knew more than the dealers I talked to about the very products they were trying to sell me!

So in my frustrated Googling I came across Chris’ Bryant RV site, which has a motherlode of Service Manuals covering many of the major manufacturers’ products from Awnings to Reefers, from Air Conditioners to Furnaces. There’s also an only slightly smaller section for RV appliance Owners Manuals.

Hats off to Chris, who also has some great tips on his companion RX4RV RV Service and Opinions Blog. I’d actually discovered his blog awhile back when I decided to grit my teeth and wade into rv.net’s Open Roads Tech Issues Forum to try to find some answers that still remain somewhat elusive.

Thanks, Chris!

New Steel - 1 1/2″ 14ga. square tubing, primed & ready for building the framework

Framework welded! Roof hole to be cut when ready for installation

Gwometts, surrounding the 10ga. Marine Wire

Insulation back in…

Ceiling Reinstalled, and paint/wibbits/caulk on the roof!

From an article on the FMCA’s (Family Motor Coach Association) 26th annual Southeast Area Rally:

New floor plans are a draw, said Ryan Hollan, sales rep for Haberson RV Pasco in Holiday. “It used to be living room, entertainment/den, then kitchen. The latest models have moved the kitchen to the front.”

In conjunction, the TV has come down to eye level after hanging from the ceiling behind the driver and front passenger seats. “It’s more of a living room feel than an RV feel,” said Hollan, a veteran RV sales rep.

[St. Petersburg Times]

As previously mentioned in Evangelina’s Floorplan, I decided on a front galley three years ago.

Surely I wasn’t the first, but still.

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.

Until I upgrade and put in spam prevention tools comments have been disabled for now. Not that anyone ever commented anyway!

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?