Little Miss Skoolie
Little Miss Skoolie, alias Sunny the Bus.
She’s a small bus. A mini. A shortie. Alias: Sunny the Bus. My wife and I liked the Little Miss Sunshine movie so much, we actually named our first-born pupper after Olive. So, naturally, while it’s not a VW Bus (I think I’m longer than a VW Bus anyway), we went along with a Little Miss, uh, Little Miss Skoolie theme.
No, we’re not that crazy to paint it yellow with a white top, as this is illegal in most of our united states, but we just liked the whole vibe of the underdog rising up and busting through the whole ‘being normal’ thing. We are, after all, far from normal. Eclectically quirky, let’s say.
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
The particulars for the geeks (myself included):
Sunny is a 2005 GMC Savanna 3500 Dually with a Corbeil coach (that’s the bus part), 5-window, with a 6.0-liter, gas-powered V8, with an automatic transmission that’s only gone 99k miles in her 17 years. We found her locally in Putnam, CT, and bought her from a fella who worked for, and bought her from, a local prep school, Marianapolis, in Northeastern Connecticut. So when you board, please wear a tie or something argyle.
How we replaced a rusty beam in the bus
Every vehicle needs a good backbone and in this case, our rig has two: One for the truck itself, the factory frame, and two, the coach frame that supports the bus structure. The truck frame, though a little surface-rusty, is quite solid and probably heavier than my Miata. The bus frame, though, as we saw in the last post, was, well, not so much. While we
Rusty Beam Tetris: Like Operation, but with a Skoolie
Under bus rust busting begins. Steph jumps in with the wire wheel. I’m not particularly fond of – or good at – metal fabbing things. I’m a wood guy for sure, despite the rally/car-guy thing. So I was a bit disheartened when Steph and I discovered that one of the coach beams, underneath the bus body and just above the truck frame rail, was
Rust, crust, and dust: Excavating Sunny’s undercarriage
Fighting claustrophobia in a HAZ-MAT suit whilst wielding a grinder. One of my favorite books/movies of all time is Stephen King’s Christine, about the ’58 Plymouth Fury that comes back to life and kills people that have harmed her in the past. I first saw it when I was 10 and read the book as soon as I knew it was a book first.
From ancestry to skoolie, a brief history
Buses Aplenty – The bus in the foreground is a 1958 International 68-passenger and the bus in the background is the 30-passenger 1950 International. If you look really closely, you’ll also spy a ’57 Chevy. You could say buses run in our blood. In the 1950s, my grandfather bought his first school bus, a 1950 International 30-passenger. He drove the local kids around rural
Doing brakes on a bus is just like doing brakes on any other vehicle, just way harder
Doing brakes on a bus is just like doing brakes on any other vehicle, just way harder and much more time consuming. After our first adventure home, we wanted to at least be able to roll the thing around the yard and up and down the street for limited shakedowns and the like. So I ordered up the parts from my go-to, RockAuto.com, which I’ve always
We found a great new watering hole
Back in the heady days of sprint-distance triathlon training (hopefully we’ll have more heady days), sometimes it got a little difficult to keep up with the training and keep out of the burnout shed. Somewhere along the line, either from a blog or a book, someone suggested that when deep in those near-burnout feelings, sometimes buying a new little gadget or toy helps reignite the energy
