Buying the Bus (part 2)

As I mentioned in the last installment, converted buses for sale seem to be spread evenly around the country, which means that seldom will you find many nearby. After two long trips to look at buses I felt close to making a decision and was about ready to settle for less than what I wanted and pay more than I intended. When this quest began I had put together a list of features that I wanted in a bus and later on I removed the non-essentials from the list and ranked the items that were left. Even then, it appeared that I would have to make more compromises on the things I wanted.

Scanning the bus ads had long ago become a daily affair and it was while I was in Orlando on the way home from one of my bus viewing trips that I spotted a GM PD4106 on Craigslist that seemed to have most of the things that I considered essential and it was listed for $20,000, more in line with the range I had been considering. The downside was that the bus was located a long way from home, in Minnesota, and I could see my wife cringe as I dialed the phone to talk to the seller. As During the conversation I was almost disappointed to hear how good everything about the bus sounded and that it contained most of the features on my list, knowing that it could mean one more trip before I could arrive at a decision. One thing I learned early on was how little you can really tell about a coach from a description and pictures. Only by spending a few hours crawling over, under, and through one, taking a test drive, and asking dozens of questions did I ever feel even close to knowing the condition of a given bus.

A Trip to Minnesota

As important as the features of a given bus conversion are, the evaluation is also about the planning that went into all of its systems and how much trouble the owner went to to do the conversion right. Ultimately the buying decision is about how much work you are willing to put in to make a newly acquired coach into the coach of your dreams. I am no spring chicken and at the time I was working a full time job and running a business too and by the end of the day I had but few hours left and even less energy to work on a bus, so for me, finding one that was complete and ready to go was important. All of the conversations about the Minnesota 4106 had sounded positive and I decided that a trip to see it had to be scheduled. Since this coach was priced to sell I wanted to get up to see it as soon as possible, but when I looked at the difference in air fares between flying during the current week or waiting an extra week, I couldn’t justify the extra cost. Additionally, it would cost more to buy a refundable ticket, so I opted for a non-refundable round-trip ticket. Both of those decisions were risky and in retrospect I would recommend paying extra to get a refundable ticket in case the coach you are flying to see sells before you get there, which mine almost did.

I scheduled the trip to take place over a weekend so that I would not miss any workdays. Had I known then that I would be laid off from my job the following week, I would have allowed more time. As it was, I arrived at the seller’s house at 5:00 PM on a Saturday evening and we had only enough time to look over the major systems and take a ride before it got dark, but not enough time to check out the operational status of every single system and appliance. Everything that I saw looked good and since my flight back home was for early the next morning, I told the owners (Sam and Charlet) that if everything on the bus worked I would buy it for the asking price. They agreed and a contract was made. We checked out the rest of the items the next morning and found that the house batteries needed to be replaced. Sam agreed to pay for new batteries. Everything else worked properly and we spent the afternoon filling all of the storage bays with some of the spare parts he had accumulated through the years.

On Monday morning we went to the bank and hit our first snag. Before I had left North Carolina I had gone to my bank to ask how one goes about getting money when in a remote location and I was assured that I could have a wire transfer initiated by the seller’s bank to get money from my account (my bank does not have a branch in Minnesota). This turned out to be an erroneous piece of information. Had I been given the correct information I could have had a cashiers check cut for the amount I needed and then if the sale was not made I could have re-deposited the money back into my account. Unfortunately, from Minnesota my options were limited. My bank offered to place a hold on the funds and fax a letter to the seller stating that the funds would be held, but the hold would be for only seven days and that was not acceptable to the seller who was afraid that it might take longer for the check to clear. Tempers flared, things were said, and finally someone suggested that my wife, who was still back in North Carolina, might be able to go to the bank and initiate a wire transfer from her account if I could get my bank to agree to transfer the money from my account to hers. Within the hour this all happened and the deal was done; I now owned my first bus.

The Trip Home

We installed the new house batteries, I asked at least a hundred more questions about how things worked, and then it was time to leave. I have to admit that sitting there in the driver’s seat with the engine running and a big trip ahead of me was intimidating. I had put about 10,000 miles on my old motorhome so I knew I would eventually get comfortable with everything but at that moment, not only was I on overload with all of the things that I was trying to remember about my new bus, but I also had to learn to shift the thing and quickly. I thanked Sam and Charlet for all the help and for putting me up over the weekend, and was off. Pulling out of their driveway and missing my first shift did not help much but I finally got it into gear. The first order of business was to fill up the fuel tank. I pulled up to the pump and realized that the one thing I had not learned was how to shut off the engine. I placed a quick embarrassing phone call and figured it out about the same time Sam answered the phone. $350 later, I was on I-90 and on my way back home. Unfortunately, it had been more than 35 years since I had shifted a non-synchromesh transmission and that first day I had a tough time making most of my shifts. I had read an article about shifting and had heard several people’s opinions on the topic, but as I quickly learned, it is more of an art than something to be learned from someone else’s instructions. That evening, as I was sharing my experiences with my wife over the phone, she suggested that I get up early and practice shifting in a parking lot before heading out for the day, which turned out to be a great idea. The people working in the stores around that parking lot must have thought I was nuts as I went round and round shifting through the gears and then stopping just to start over again, but after about a half hour I started to get the hang of it. By the end of that day I could at least up-shift through the gears without any grinding but my down-shifting still needed some work and I knew that with mountains ahead I had to improve.

There was a cold front blowing through and the nighttime temperatures were going to be in the mid-30s, so I bought blankets for the bed even though I knew there were some waiting for me when I got home. The furnace fired up several times during the night and I reminded myself to be sure to get the propane tanks filled the next day. I was happy when there was enough propane left in the tanks to get me through the night. Back on the road the next day, I noticed how more comfortable it was to travel these days. Cell phones, Wi-Fi hotspots, and GPS, all things we did not have on our 6-month trip ten years earlier, certainly made navigation and communication easier. I pulled into a crowded mall parking lot so that I could stop for lunch. The parking lot driveway was crowded with cars, making it impossible to turn as wide as I would have liked. I looked in the rearview mirror as I pulled in and saw that I had cleared the car that was waiting to exit, but not by as much as I would have liked. I still had some things to learn about driving a coach that was 11 feet longer than the one I had previously driven. As I pulled through the parking lot I found that each aisle I passed was very narrow and clogged with traffic. I quickly reached the end and had nowhere to go but around the side of the building. I was quickly running out of space and had very little room to turn around. Toward the end of the parking lot I pulled around one of those racks that holds shopping carts and thinking that I had plenty of clearance I continued the U-turn. I glanced in the mirror and quickly locked up the brakes when I saw that I was about to wipe out the side of the coach on the rack. After I stopped I got out to look at the side of the coach. I could have barely fit a piece of paper between the rack and the side of the coach but they never touched. This was another lesson learned and I doubted that it would be the last one.

I knew that I had to cross the mountains somewhere to get back home. I-40 had been closed for months due to a rockslide and I was not sure that it was open yet. I had gone that way before and knew that there were miles of steep grades. I decided that I would try a different route through West Virginia on I-64/I-77 and hoped that I was not making a mistake by doing so as I was still pretty nervous about down-shifting on upgrades. I had found the first day that 62 MPH felt like about the right speed. I have always had a pretty heavy accelerator foot and it took a while to get used to being passed by everything on the road. In eastern Kentucky the hills got steeper and I was happy to have the power of the 8v71. I was routinely passing trucks on uphill grades and being passed by them going down the other side since I was still not as comfortable taking turns at high speed as most of the truckers were. I figured that my center of gravity was higher and that the airbag suspension allowed more leaning. The hills got steeper and the corners got sharper. Doesn’t anyone in this part of the country know how to bank a turn? I was glad to have a towel in my lap because my palms were sweating like crazy. The first time I had to downshift I missed the shift and before I finally got it into third I was down to about 20 MPH, too slow for third so I had to downshift again. This happened several times before I finally figured out that I was better off not using the clutch when downshifting (as Sam had recommended).

It was starting to get dark and I realized that I needed to turn on my headlights, something I had not done before. I thought I remembered that the second round switch controlled the lights and that the first position was for running lights and the second position was for headlights. So while climbing a really steep hill I switched on the running lights (cool!) and then switched to position two and the engine died (not so cool). I quickly turned the switch back off and the engine restarted but by then I had lost all my momentum and was downshifting, still with no headlights, with no idea how to turn them on, and no place to pull over and figure it out. I took the next exit as suggested by my GPS to stop for the night and seemingly mile after mile went by as it got darker and darker and still there was no place to pull over. I finally found a parking lot and found the correct switch, just in time to stop for the night.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful with no catastrophes. I found a place for the bus in my front yard and made some run-up blocks since the slope was a little more extreme than what the leveling system could handle. A few days later Flora asked me “so, is owning the bus as much fun as it was searching for a bus?” This was a very appropriate question. This whole saga had really reinforced the notion that the fun of life is as much in the journey as in achieving a goal. I had to admit that learning about buses, talking to people all over the country, and ultimately traveling to new places to look at buses had been an adventure unto itself. I also quickly tired of looking at the coach sitting in the yard; I wanted to go somewhere!

Lessons Learned

The following list contains a few of the things I recommend for those looking for their first coach.

• Learn as much as you can about buses and the systems they contain. No matter what your previous experiences, these machines are a whole different animal and between the bus systems/components and the support systems that are installed during a conversion, there is a lot to know.
• Take advantage of on-line resources. There are many different forums and groups available, and the people who contribute there know a lot. You can read and you can ask questions and there is hardly a question you can ask that has not been asked before (and is therefore available in the archives).
• Make and refine both a budget and a list of features you want. Separate out those features that are in your opinion essential from those that would be nice but that you can live without. I found that it is unlikely that you will find a coach with everything on your list unless your budget is unlimited.
• Find or create some kind of tool to keep track of coaches you see and the features they have and the contacts you make with their owners. I found that my memory was quickly overwhelmed and had I not created a spreadsheet that contained a checklist of features I was interested in and which coaches had which of them, I would have quickly lost track.
• Consider videotaping when you are looking at a coach. I regret not doing this when Sam spent hours showing me the features of the coach I bought. On trips when my wife was with me I had her take pictures while I asked questions and afterward we were able to better remember what features a coach had. Again, when you are looking a multiple coaches it is easy to forget which one had what.
• Work with an insurance agent and your bank so that you can easily get a policy and the money you need, while in a remote location. And be sure that the bank has given you the correct information; having the money in your account and being unable to access it is a very frustrating situation for both buyer and seller.
• Be patient. Right now there are a lot of wonderful coaches for sale and the selling prices are a fraction of what was being asked a few years back when the economy was better and fuel was cheaper. I certainly was tempted by several coaches along the way and considered settling for coaches that might not have been as good a fit or for paying more than I wanted, but in the end I held out and was rewarded for my patience.

Buses

Back when Flora and I first got together, more than 10 years ago at this point, we decided that we needed to do some serious research before we picked a spot to live for the next few years. We packed up our possessions and put them in storage, bought an old motorhome, and hit the road. We spent 6 months making a big circle around the US and Canada and then lived in that motorhome for six more months after moving to Chapel Hill. In retrospect I realize that it was not a very good machine to trust out lives to. By their nature motorhomes are pretty top heavy and prone to rollovers and I have since seen pictures of these machines (mostly constructed of plywood and 2x2's on top of a truck frame) after a rollover and the result is pretty much a pile of kindling.

Our coach was not very fast, not very reliable, not very big, and the big 454 Chevy engine sucked down a lot of fuel; we were lucky to get 8 MPG. It was only 26' long and with two big Rottweilers in there with us there was not much space. We started our trip in Florida and about a week and a half later we were in Nova Scotia, where we spent the next three weeks. Our next destination was Denver where we wanted to visit my folks before heading for the west coast. We were camping in Kentucky one evening and I heard the low rumble of a diesel engine. When I looked up I saw my first bus-conversion pulling into the space next to ours. I had never considered that such a thing even existed.

Oh sure there were skoolies: school buses that had been converted into some kind of camper after their life of transporting kids was over; didn't the Partridge Family have one of those? But this was not one of those. Skoolies are not really built for the open road nor are they meant to travel a million miles or last for 50 years. I think of them as being slow, underpowered, and cumbersome, and are mostly built out of steel, which eventually rusts away. No, this was a GM PD 4104 intercity bus, probably an ex-Greyhound, built out of aluminum with a big 2 stroke Detroit Diesel engine. Theses buses were built to run several million miles in relative safety and comfort. The fact that once retired, these old buses were sometimes converted into motor-coaches had never entered into my consciousness. I remember thinking how big those tires looked compared to mine and it occurred to me that bigger tires turn at lower RPMs meaning less heat and longer life. Combined with a beefy engine that had lots of torque at low RPMs probably made a much more reliable drivetrain than what I had. From that point forward it was hard to avoid the thought that someday I wanted one of those!

Fast forward ten years. We were now planning for retirement in the next few years and had decided that we found the snowbird life very appealing. Spending the summers in Nova Scotia and then returning to Chapel Hill when the weather started getting nasty seemed like a perfect way to live for a few years. The big question was how to afford it. At the time I was designing a timberframe house in North Carolina and thought that I would build a second one on the 4-acre site I had purchased in Meteghan NS. The issue of course was how to make mortgage payments on two houses on a fixed income. When I was laid off from my job in March 2009 I quickly realized that we would have to make other plans. That is when the idea of a converted bus came up one more time. If we could keep the modest double-wide where we are living now (which is paid for) and buy a nice bus, we could drive that to Nova Scotia each summer and have a place to stay while we were there. With the addition of a small support building containing maybe a kitchen, bathroom, laundry facilities, and a deck and we would be all set. The price of already-converted buses had been driven down by the economy and the high price of fuel so I saw no reason to wait and started researching buses.

How the heck do I decide what bus to get?

I looked at my first bus conversion last October. It was an MCI-5C and seemed to have just about everything I wanted in a bus, and maybe it would have been better if I had just bought it right then and there. It was $30K, a price that I could afford, and would probably have satisfied all of my needs in replacing my ancient (at least it seemed ancient until I started looking at 1950’s buses) broken down, falling apart motorhome (as I later learned, it would affectionately be known as a stick and staple job). But at that point I knew little about Detroit Diesel 2 strokes and all of the other mechanicals of a bus, so I figured I would do a bit more research, refine my tastes, and eventually figure out exactly which motorcoach was right for me.

I signed up for every bus-related Yahoo group and busnut bulletin board that I could find and started spending all of my evenings (just ask my wife Flora, who has since become a bus-widow) reading about buses. I spent every spare hour reading about air brakes, power steering upgrades, which buses are notorious rust buckets, the finer points of tank building, pure sine wave inverters, gas vs diesel gensets and how to size ones generator requirements, and the thousand of other technical issues that are related to bus conversions. In those few months I learned a lot but I also realized there is always a lot more to know.

But the bottom line is that not only is spring coming and I want a bus, but I have always prided myself on my ability to make quick decisions and have always laughed those who research every little detail, sign up for consumer reports, ask a million pointless questions, and take months to make even the simplest of decisions. That’s not me – look up the word impetuous in the dictionary and you will see my picture! So as these months went by I developed a plan, figured out what was important to me, investigated which makes and models best fit my needs, rated the features I wanted in order of importance, and tried to get a handle on a situation that was never ever apples and apples.

One of the big issues is that you can’t just go down the local Busmart and browse through the offerings. These things are located all over the country and are often very far from home or even from a reasonable airport. But given that, I was able to find a couple of GMC 4106’s that were in or near my price range that were only (“only” is a very relative term in the case of buses) a day’s drive away. So the wife and I scheduled a vacation day so that we would have a 3-day weekend, set up our appointments, and took our little trip. I was ecstatic to finally be able to look at and drive some buses and felt like I might finally be near to making a decision and driving one home!

The owner of the first bus that I wanted to see had volunteered to drive his bus a few hours to Lake City so that we didn’t have to add an extra 5-6 hours to an already long day’s drive. Getting up at 4:00 AM and driving 800 miles is not something I enjoy all that much. I am more of a 300 mile a day guy and night driving is not something I wish to do at all. We had taken a 6-month motorhome trip around the country in 1999 and most days I tried to limit the driving to 300 miles, but this time, with only a day to do one leg of the trip, I had little choice.

We met in the parking lot of a restaurant along the interstate. The outside of the bus was gorgeous. The classic styling of the 4106 is very nice to begin with and this one had a shiny coat of bluish Imron paint. I once had my old 240Z painted with Imron and it still looked like the paint was wet 5 years later! Since the owner was inside getting coffee I poked around; no dents, very few dings, no corrosion that I could find. The tires looked brand new with no checking. Soon we got to go inside; the inside was as nice as the outside, nicely decorated and ready to go. I could see that he had not scrimped on materials. We took a ride and there were no surprises. The Allison 730 shifted kind of hard but I understand that is pretty normal. It rode as smooth as glass; I love airbag suspension! Before we left we had opened every compartment and talked about every feature but we knew we had another few hours to drive (hopeful to arrive before dark) so we declined coffee and got back on the road.

Back in the truck, Flora and I discussed the bus. I had originally not really known how she felt about this whole bus adventure but she really liked this particular bus. Of course I was interested in the mechanicals (since I am the one who would have to maintain and repair them) and she was more interested in how the exterior and the furnishings looked. I admitted that it was all very pretty but was still not sure I wanted to lose a couple miles per gallon to an automatic.

The second bus, also a 4106, was much more of a plain Jane. The paint was pretty good but the interior would mostly have to be torn out and redone. The gennie was gas and at only 5K would run only a single AC unit, the tires were starting to crack, there was some corrosion around the rear cap that would have to be dealt with soon, and there were no maintenance records at all. On the other hand, it had the 4 speed that I had been looking for, the engine ran fine and stopped smoking after a minute or so, and the $20,000 difference in price would pay for a lot of tires, carpeting, and furniture. It was the first time I had had to double clutch in 40 years and it is not like riding a bike; indeed I ground the gears a bit. Undaunted, I still preferred its standard transmission to the Allison.

So after all this, the big problem was that I was maybe even farther from making a decision than I had been before. The $30,000 bus was really nice but had a transmission that would get me only 6.5 mpg. If I am going to get that kind of mileage then what is the point of getting a 35’ lightweight bus; I had just as well get a 40’ MCI. The $10,000 bus needed a lot of work and with 2 jobs already how was I going to fit that into my schedule? So now I am back at the drawing board and I have a feeling that deciding which bus to get might take a while.

Stay tuned for part two, Buying the Bus.