Transform a Bus Into an RV Palace
With the right mix of DIY skills and vision, a bus can be converted into a durable, fully appointed mobile home. Icemaker included, no tickets required.
Champ had never built a vehicle before, but having worked on everything from lawnmowers to locomotives, he felt he was ready for a challenge. He envisioned a mobile dream home, and he drew its footprint with masking tape on the floor of his shop. Then he laid out rods of steel square tubing and began to weld, leaving ample space for panoramic windows. To arch the roof bows, he built his own steel bender. The resulting skeleton was 43 ft. long, 12 ft. high and 812 ft. wide (the legal limit), and Champ mounted the front and rear suspension of a ‘98 Freightliner semi on it. To that he added a Detroit Diesel 6V92 with a Jake Brake and aftercooler, as well as a five-speed Allison automatic transmission.
The only items that Champ salvaged from his rusted-out bus were the spring hangers and the identification plate. So as far as the DMV is concerned, Champ’s creation is a 1951 GMC. Yearly cost of registration: $55.
Near the Nobody II, Byron Belmont of Eugene, Ore., had parked a genuine GMC—a 1962 passenger bus custom painted with panels of grays and blues. When Belmont—a one-time helicopter mechanic, railroad brakeman and potato farmer—bought the 41-seat Trailways coach 20 years ago, it had been running between Texas and Oklahoma. Determined to make the bus taller, Belmont whacked the structural ribs with a Sawzall, hoisted the roof and then re-joined the ribs with 8-in. bars. Of course, this required buying a welder. When I asked if he knew much about welding at the outset, he said, “I do now.”
To combat summer heat, Belmont created an 8-in. attic between the new roof and the ceiling and installed a draft fan to pull air out of the cabin, keeping a constant circulation of cooler air overhead. He then started on the bus’s interior, first plumbing a bathroom and kitchen, next wiring all the components, using marine gauges for monitoring and switches. He installed wood floors in the kitchen and marble in the bathroom, and custom-fit all the closets and cabinets to the peculiar curves of the rounded ceiling. He spared no expense, using only oak and black cherry for the wood trim. The kitchen is nicer than those in many people’s homes, with a four-burner propane stove, fridge, microwave, dishwasher, built-in blender and icemaker. “It’s an investment of love more than money,” Belmont told me. “Everything’s personal to it. And each bus has its own personality.”
We were sipping Black Velvet under a shade canopy when a purple rig pulled into the berth beside us. Byron and his wife Joanne jumped out of their chairs to greet its owner, Joni Goodman. A pretty blond woman with a deep suntan and dangling silver earrings, she had the warm twinkling eyes of someone who’d spent a lot of winters in Baja California.
Goodman’s bus has become her lifestyle. In 1989 she and her husband bought the 1973 GM Buffalo, filled the empty hull with raw materials and headed up to Alaska. A year later, they’d converted the Greyhound’s interior with solid teak paneling, a roomy kitchen and a custom bathroom.
When Goodman’s husband died, she learned to drive the bus herself, naming it the Strayhound. It wasn’t easy being a widow in a world of couples, and Goodman remembers just one other single woman on the tour—that is, the migratory herd of RV and bus owners that roams Arizona and California in the winter and the Pacific Northwest in the summer.
“We’d drink wine and cry on each other’s shoulder and curse mechanics,” Goodman said. She regretted not having learned more about how buses worked when she was younger, so she started a crash course, reading the owner’s manuals for diesel engines and other repair books. “I had to know at least enough to fool the mechanics into thinking I knew what they were saying.”
For most of a decade she drifted back and forth between Alaska and Mexico. Then, in 1998, she piloted the Strayhound to an RV jamboree in Oregon. In pulled a rig hauling a double-decker trailer with a jeep and a Hobie Cat. The boat’s name: Straycat. The driver’s name was Rick Fox, a woodworker with gray locks flowing to his shoulders, a real gold nugget lashed to his throat and gemstones in both ears. Within nine months she and Fox were married.
The two have been traveling together for nine years, with occasional layovers in Coos Bay, Ore. Goodman has driven the Alaska Highway 42 times. At first it took Fox a while to take ownership of the vehicle—”You don’t just jump in and take over a woman’s bus,” Goodman says—but since then he’s proved an ideal partner. Fox installed a Greasel conversion kit: The Strayhound now runs on straight vegetable oil from the disposal bins of diners. They’ve also installed solar panels on the roof, which can send as much as 24 amps into a bank of six marine batteries, enabling them to run their electronics without having to fire up the generator.
