6 Things that Surprised Us about our Bus Conversion

Here are 6 things that surprised us during the school bus conversion process. If you are new here, a contractor actually build a lot of the bus before we moved in and took over. You can follow that journey and see all the delays by clicking here or keep reading below to see some things we didn’t expect about the school bus conversion process.

So Much Rust

We knew from the beginning that we were going to hire a builder for our skoolie. Because of that, I didn’t do a lot of research as far as what to expect during the process. If you’ve seen our timeline, then you already know that a few snags along the way resulted in us doing some of the demo work. This is my face when I saw how much rust was under the bus flooring.

Come to find out, it really wasn’t as bad as some. We had the entire thing sandblasted and a few holes welded. Good as new.

The Bay Doors Didn’t Come with Keys

We were so excited about the giant storage boxes under the school bus. I never noticed them on buses before we were school bus shopping, but these buses are built for field trips and sporting events. We were shocked to find out that there weren’t any keys. It was such an ordeal for Chris to get new locking mechanisms and keys cut for them.

International parts are expensive

The latch that holds the cover over our engine is broke. They wanted _____ to replace it.

Pricey Parts

I wish I had a photo of the part I’m going to talk about. Our bus has a front engine and it has a hood that cover it and latches down. The latch that holds it in place is broken and it would cost $150 to replace that small piece of metal.

So Many Wires

Wheel Wells

The floor plan took a lot longer because with a flat nose bus you have 4 wheel wells inside instead of 2. The plan we came up with would have worked great for a dog nose bus. Once we figured out how to work around those, we also had the ceiling emergency exit to contend with. We didn’t want to cover it so we spent a lot of hours pushing walls around on paper to make it fit with our other priorities (privacy being a big one). Learn more about our floor plan here.

The Interlock System

There were times when our bus wouldn’t start because of the interlock system. Wires were being moved around and there were times when the bus thought the back door was opened. When the bus thinks the back door is open, it won’t start. We weren’t with the bus when this was happening since it was partially built by a contractor. We had to have a mobile bus repair service come out and disable the interlock system since we weren’t there to do it. Kind of a a pain!