This involved disassembling many odds and ends, like molding, and where we couldn’t remove paneling (like around the ceiling A/C unit) we used a grinder to cut off as much as possible. We got on the scene in mid-April and took the bus up to my parents’ house in Idaho, where we finished taking out seats and ripped out the fiberglass paneling on the interior of the bus. These guys also took out poles for us, which was nice of them, but ruined any hope of turning the bus into a stripper club at night. Most of the seats in the bus were attached to a steel track on the wall the three they left in were bolted through the floor. While the bus was living with David’s sister and her husband, they helped us out by removing all but three of the seats. I giggled like a little kid for about half an hour. The is a picture of me driving off into the sunset after picking up the bus. It’s tall enough for me (6’2″) to stand in. The interior space is 7.5′ wide and about 16′ long depending on how you measure it. If this whole endeavor was going to work out, I (David) needed to be able to work on the road and in order to do that I needed a dedicated space that I could close off. It also had a back door which was important for our plans to make an office in the back. It’s 25’ long without the bike rack and is tall enough for us to stand up in (a little more than 6’3” inside). With the timeline we were trying to stick to we didn’t have the time to spend grinding out rust and fixing structural problems. This meant that it was well maintained and had no rust or body problems that needed fixing. The bus only had one previous owner (the city of Tempe, AZ) and spent it’s entire life in a flat, desert environment. (10 months and 30,000 miles later this has proved to be a good decision!) Above all, we wanted this thing to be reliable and in the event of a breakdown we wanted it to be cheap and easy to fix. After talking to some family who owned trucks with the same engine we decided it would be a good fit for us. The Ford 6.8L V10 engine has been known to run for a looooong time. The bus had 143,000 miles on it which wasn’t bad for vehicles in the price range we were looking in. We knew they were old we learned they were actually dry-rotted and cracked from living in the desert sun. On the drive from Phoenix to Salt Lake City, David had a lot of trouble with the tires. We purchased the bus, and David flew out a few weeks later to drive it up to live with family in Utah. It had 143,000 miles, a V-10 engine and, since it had spent its life as a city bus in Tempe, AZ, no rust. We decided to move forward on a 2007 Eldorado Aerotech built on a Ford E450 chassis. David’s parents spend a lot of time in Scottsdale, and they happened to be there at the time, so they went to his shop and sent us lots of pictures and videos of a few shuttle buses. In the process of Googling buses for sale, we found a dealer in Scottsdale, AZ (website HERE) who buys used vehicles at auction, cleans them up and re-sells them. So most of what we did will apply to anyone converting a vehicle, but we especially hope this post can find some fellow shuttle bus converter and be of use! Buying the Bus A lot of the information transferred to what we were doing, but certain processes, like attaching insulation and paneling to our bus frame, were very different. ![]() There are many more resources for converting vans and school buses than there are for buses like ours. Google and YouTube consistently came in clutch when we had very specific questions, especially about wiring and plumbing, and there were a few Instagram accounts we found of people who were converting shuttle buses like ours, which was helpful. Our best resources in this process were, where there are excellent advice forums and lots of contributors with conversion experience, and THIS Sprinter conversion sourcebook. ![]() We DIY-ed the whole process and it was a steep learning curve, but turned out fine (i.e., no explosions.) In the end, we couldn’t find any professionals who were both willing to work on a conversion and available within our time frame. We did, however, want to hire someone to help with plumbing (since it would be a simple system and, we thought, easy and quick for a pro to do) and wiring (since we had very little experience with electrical work and didn’t want to blow anything up). This was mostly for money reasons, but we were also really interested in learning to put a living space together ourselves. (more on that decision here!), we knew whichever vehicle we ended up with, we’d be doing the conversion ourselves. When we were deciding whether to get a bus, van or R.V.
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