Little Miss Skoolie
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.
Just a quick note: Throughout this build, I have used many, many products from Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. However, I will only link to products that I used and found helpful. Some products I even provide mini reviews for because they are so good. Screws and sandpaper are not always created equal. OK then, now get going!
How we put in our skoolie floor in 132 easy steps
Compared to skoolie people, you could say that most DIY vanlifers have it kind of easy. Since most buy empty cargo vans, even if a few years old, they have a distinct advantage of sweeping the thing out, then get rockin’ & rollin’ on the install. Skoolie weirdos, on the other hand, have to dismantle everything before, uh, re-mantling? Y’know, we have to take a whole
Pennies and POR-15: The skoolie floor comes up
Ughs. We thought about, for more than several moments, that we were just going to slap a new floor over the old and let it be done. We were on a mission after all. As much as a massive hassle this was to remove, we were glad we went the distance to pull up the old water-soaked rubber and plywood floor. Here’s a hint on how
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. Here's how
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.
Bussin’ in the Family: 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. I recently learned that in the 1950s, my grandfather bought his first school bus, a 1950 International 30-passenger. He drove the
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
Top 6 reasons we bought a skoolie
I’ve got a damn bus to build, so let’s not muck about and get right to it… No. 6 – PRICE. Every traditional camper van was approximately $9 million at the height of the times we were looking, on the back half of COVID. Kayaks were impossible to find the year before. We were fans of the RoadTrek brand in the late 90s, but they were always
DISCLAIMER: I only think I know what I’m talking about
I got my license in 1989 at 16.5 years old, the youngest possible in the great state of Massachusetts. I bought my first car based on a Creature Double Feature movie called Duel, Stephen Spielberg's first 'Made for TV' movie (side note, I would later 'work' with Spielberg as an extra in Amistad). Anywho, the car was a 1970 Plymouth Valiant. The movie came out in
