Passenger Bus Work Day 9/14/2019

Hurricane Dorian came and went and for our rescheduled workday we had perfect weather thankfully. Our first task was to disassemble the rear end for inspection. We got lucky and the rear drums slid right off!



Disassembly of the brake and removal of the backing plates next.

It took us a little while to get the cross braces off - rusty stubborn bolts - OF COURSE !

But we did it and as you can see the main drive cover and the banjo all came apart with relative ease - except for that pesky round wire snap ring holding the speedometer gear!

Did anybody mention that these things are HEAVY!

Now we load the chassis onto the car trailer for transportation to the Powder Coating Company. Monday we will take it to be sandblasted and painted.

Next we decide to disassemble the rear helper springs for refurbishing.

We also did a little sand blasting of parts, but first a change of the protective screen to help see the work.

Upon inspection of the differential and axle bearings, we decide that the bearings and races have to be replace. This old bus spent many years in an old barn that periodically flooded the rear axles etc. We attempted to remove the bearing races unsuccessfully with a hooked slider hammer. Our solution was to Dremel a slice through the race to relax the press fit and that worked.

We also had time to straighten the mounting brackets for the spare tire mount. The Mounting brackets were slightly twisted.

After all the hard work we take time to go through our parts and determine what is good, reparable and non-reparable.

We load up the spare engine and the donated rebuilt engine to go to Don's workshop for a "once over" and assembly of a donated lightened flywheel with V8 pressure plate.

Here is an image of some of the restored parts for later assembly

And unfortunately the bus' bell housing had some damage - but no worries we found a replacement.

The bell housing is very usable, but we chose to get one that is not damaged.

We called it a day around 2pm (of course after lunch!). Monday I loaded up the trailer and took the chassis to "Area 51 Powdercoating" in Wilmington, NC. They have an oven that is 20 feet long that will easily take the whole chassis in for curing!

The chassis should all be sand blasted, primed and painted black in about a week. We are all very happy to get to this milestone.

Thank You Geri for taking pictures again !

Passenger Bus "Mini" workday

Today September 7, 2019 we had planned for our Coastal Carolina A's Club to meet for another bus chassis workday, however Hurricane Dorian and its track up the Coastal Carolina forced us to postpone until September 14th. Luckily the impact of Hurricane Dorian was very minimal THIS TIME! Mike our expert welder was available to come down to finish up all the welding repairs etc. on the frame. We worked for about 4 hours. Following are some images that I was able to capture.

First was to finish repairs and strengthening the #3 crossmember. This bus will be put into service and judging by how this particular crossmember was beat to "you know what" our team had decided that "function" trumps "fine points" and we extensively beefed up this crossmember.

I made a little video of Mike welding.

Mike cleaning up the welds from the slag.

And a final look at the #3 crossmember all finished.

Next we focused on the rear leaf spring pivot axle. These axles had been worn by years of grinding with no lubrication. The axles had been repaired some but they were still way out of round. This won't do and we decided to lay a few more weld beads for the arduous task of hand filing and grinding the axles back to round. Below you can see the weld lines (the chassis is flipped upside down exposing the worn area and making it easier to build up the axles).

After about two hours of grinding and filing - more work is needed to complete the repair and that will happen this coming week--but it is almost done.

Next we focused on the spare tire brackets. We noticed that two of them had been bent away from their position. Mike heated the areas up and I using a rather large pipe wrench bent the flanges into their proper position. It took us about 5 tries to get these right - each time placing a spare tire up on the frame for fit.

 Sorry for the blurred images - today we didn't have Vivian or Geri taking photos - just me (Grier)!

Here is one flange finished (the other side looks the same).

Well that's all we did today. The chassis is now ready to be taken to the Powder Coat Company (they have a 20 foot oven that our chassis will fit). We are all excited to meet this milestone!

Next Saturday the 14th we plan to finish disassembly of the rear end. Once this is complete we can make our final assessments of the repair items that we will need to get this chassis back to a "running chassis".