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".