Our Search For A Bus (And How We Got One!)
Where To Start?
Most people have never driven a bus. Most people don’t know much about buses, except that they’re yellow… That’s about all we knew too. So, our journey to bus ownership started like this:
- We want to buy a bus – Searched craigslist nearby.
- Found a bus not far away on Craigslist that looks good! – It’s already sold 🙁
- Searched Ebay – Nothing really popping up.
- Search Google – Found a bus that looks awesome! But wait, are all buses the same? No.
- What should we look for in a bus then? Found the website skoolie.net.
- Started our crash course in bus education!
It was skoolie.net that really got us on a roll. It is hands down THE number one place we recommend for anyone interested in this lifestyle. It’s a forum filled with people who have a wealth of information and are very friendly and willing to help answer anything you don’t know about buses. And trust us, there is a lot that we didn’t know!
Isn’t A Bus A Bus?
NO!
We quickly found out that if you wanted to buy a bus, there’s a plethora of options for sale, probably even near where you live. But, (And it’s a big but) you really want to put a lot of thought into what you want to do with your future tiny house on wheels, because not all buses are created equal.
There are mountain buses, highway buses, city buses, transit buses, activity buses, tour buses, handicap buses… The list goes on.
The learning curve was pretty steep for us, so we’ll try to go through the big, and important questions that came up for us.
How Big Did We Want It?
This is obviously a very important question because it determines how much space you’ll have inside to work with as well as where you’ll be able to take your skoolie. It all depends on your personal plans and how minimal of an interior space you’re comfortable living in.
There is a wide range of sizes to be found. Everything from the very short Type A (about 20′ bumper to bumper) to the 40′ long Type D! The maximum legal length of a school bus in the US is 45′, although we didn’t see anything longer than 40′ in our search.
The super short ones are usually based on a van chasis and have familiar school bus body. We didn’t consider these with our search, but there are lots of people who have converted these into beautiful homes! They’re also much more like driving a van than a bus. Bottom line, don’t overlook these if you don’t need a lot of space!
In our case, we wanted something that was in the mid-range length. We didn’t want the super huge ones for a few reasons. Number one is that we didn’t want to limit where we could go. Some of the State and National Parks don’t allow vehicles over a certain length. Most parks allow vehicles under 35′, but only a little over half allow vehicles 45′ long.
Another consideration for us was our shift towards minimalism. Most people would probably say that living in a any size bus would force you to be pretty minimal. But in the relative space of a 40′ bus vs a 20′ bus, we wanted to find something close to the middle. That would help us stay minimal, but would allow us to have just a little extra space as our son grows older (bigger).
What Model Years Should We Consider?
There’s a wide range of “vintage” to choose from. And it matters!
It didn’t take us long to realize that a lot of people were making skoolies out of buses that are older than most cars you see on the road today. That’s not to say you can’t buy something only a couple of years old, but it will probably be pretty expensive and there are some mechanical factors that could bite you.
Schools pay a hefty price for a new bus, so they want to use it for a long time. Some schools might hang on to their buses for 15 or 20 years before selling them off! While you might think that newer is better, the good news is that schools have to keep these beasts pretty well maintained, for obvious safety reasons. So even a 20 year old bus can be a solid platform to work with.
If you want a Diesel engine, there’s a magic line of 2004 that has big implications. This is the year that a new EPA standard went into effect. It required manufacturers to find ways to reduce emissions, not a bad thing of course! However, this meant that Diesel engines had to have new technologies designed into them. We read many warnings that for simplicity and to prevent high repair shop bills, it’s a great idea to stick to model year 2003 or older. So, for us, that became the cap on how new we were willing to go.
What Kind Of Engine and Transmission?
To start with, choose between diesel or gas. You don’t find many buses of bigger size that use gas engines. If you’re sticking with the Type A’s, you’ll find lots of gas engines.
We knew what size we were looking for and we knew it was going to be a diesel. So, the next thing we looked into was what manufacturer of engine did we want to consider. There are a lot to choose from, but the big names are Navistar, Cummins, Caterpillar, Mercedes, Ford, Detroit Diesel and GM (Chevy). Then, there are different sizes of engine that each of these companies makes.
All of them have their strengths and weaknesses, but we quickly discovered that Navistar and Cummins seemed to be the most praised on skoolie.net. Caterpillar and Mercedes seemed to be good too, but they also seemed to be known for their high repair costs because of proprietary parts.
So, we narrowed our search down to only include Navistar and Cummins.
Navistar
The two main engines from Navistar we were looking for were the DT466 and the T444. The DT466 is a very robust, powerful, and reliable engine built for medium and heavy duty applications. The T444 isn’t bad, but it isn’t quite as powerful and is really meant for lighter duty.
Cummins
Cummins had two common engines in school buses; the 8.3 liter and the 5.9 liter. The 8.3 is quite a bit bigger and more powerful than the 5.9, but it isn’t usually found on smaller buses. We didn’t really get too wrapped up in looking for an 8.3 vs a 5.9., we just looked for a Cummins.
Transmissions
Now, the transmission issue is a big one. A lot of people don’t really consider the transmission, and honestly, that’s fine. But, we wanted to know what differences there were and what to avoid.
We found out that most buses have automatic transmissions and most of those are built by a company called Allison. This company has a great reputation for building very strong and reliable heavy duty transmissions. However, there was a time when they built one by the name of the AT545. This is a transmission to avoid! That is, if you want to drive your bus a long distance and up any mountains. The AT545 has a tendency to get too hot and fail when subjected to those types of conditions.
For us, we knew we wanted to travel a lot and go up mountains, so we scratched that one off our list. But we learned that the Allison 1000, Allison 2000, Allison MT643, and Allison MD30-60 were all great options for what we wanted to do. The benefit to these over the AT545 is they have a lockup torque converter. Basically, this helps keep the transmission cooler when cruising the highway and they’re better at climbing hills.
So, anything but the AT545 it was!
Flat Nose or Dog Nose?
At first, we were dead set on the classic “dog nose” or conventional style school bus instead of the flat nose style. We like the look better, we figured they were more aerodynamic, quieter inside and they are easier to work on the engine when you need too. But after a while we started to see the value in the flat nose buses.
The main upside to the flat noses is you can get the same amount of interior living space with an overall shorter bus versus the dog nose. They also have the front wheels behind the driver, so making turns is a little easier. But the shorter bus part was enough to for the flat nose to take the edge for us.
What Should A Used Bus Cost, Anyway?
This is a question that doesn’t really have a good answer. There are buses for $1,000 and there are buses for $15,000. There are even buses that are already converted that could be $40,000 or more! It really depends on what size, powertrain, and who you’re buying it from. We decided that with our current financial situation we were willing to pay $5,000 max.
Where Do You Find A Bus To Buy?
After a lot of early searching, we discovered that the most likely places for us to find our bus were Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and auctions. Most schools are required to sell their retired buses at auctions, but some states will sell retired buses directly to private individuals, North Carolina being one of them.
Craigslist
Most of what we found on Craigslist were private individuals selling buses they bought while intending to convert, but never did and were trying to offload their investment. There’s no shortage of inventory here, but the prices were a bit on the high side. Most of what we were seeing was at least $5,000 and a lot were closer to $8,000.
Facebook Marketplace
This market seemed to have a lot more buses for sale than Craigslist and it was very easy to communicate with sellers. But, just like Craigslist, it was mostly private sellers that had a conversion in mind but decided to abandon it and wanted to try to make a little money on it. You might be able to haggle the price down with some sellers, but again, they were mostly going for $5,000 to $8,000.
North Carolina!
This one had us excited. The state maintains a site with every bus they have for sale. They give you details like make, model, year, engine, milage and price (not negotiable). We went through every bus and made our list of candidates. Then we called every school that had the buses on our list to ask them specific questions about them.
The people we spoke to were all very friendly and willing to talk to us. Some even sent us pictures! They were all mostly in good shape and their prices are reasonable. Unfortunately though, they almost all have the AT545 transmission. If that doesn’t matter to you then this is a great place to look. We did seriously consider a couple of them even though we wanted to avoid that transmission, but we ultimately decided to keep looking.
Auctions
There are lots of auctions out there, but really just a couple that we saw the most potential with: govdeals.com and publicsurplus.com.
Auctions are where you’ll find the best deals. The prices start out super low and you might be able to snag a bus for as little as $1,000. We saw some go for a lot higher than we expected, but most were going for around $2,000. There are two catches. The first is obvious – you have to be the winner of the auction to get the bus. The second is you will likely have to pay a buyer’s premium on top of the winning auction price. This is usually about 10%. Not a huge deal but it does bump up the overall investment.
The auctions are where we decided to focus our search.
Be Ware Of The Rust Belt!
We (currently) live in Indiana. We know what winter roads can do to vehicles. So, it’s a really good idea to search somewhere outside of The Rust Belt if you want to buy a bus that will be a solid foundation to build on and will last for many adventures.
We didn’t strictly shy away from anything outside the rust belt but we did focus our search on the south and southeast states of the US. The western and southwestern states are known for having some very rust free buses, but we weren’t super on board with having to fly somewhere to get a bus. Although this does work out for a lot of people!
Early on in our search we came across a used car lot in northern Kentucky that had a couple a bus that matched most our criteria, except the rust belt part. But it wasn’t a far off drive so we drove down to check them out. It didn’t take long to realize that the rust belt is real. Some people might not have thought it was too bad, but for us, that bus had WAY more rust than we were willing to deal with and it was back to south for our search.
The Winner
After a lot of searching and watching the auctions the day finally came when we saw a bus matching just about all of our criteria pop up on govdeals.com.
It was a 27 foot, 2001 Bluebird TC2000, with a Cummins 5.9 and an Allison 2000 series transmission. And it was in the south, Alabama! We had a great feeling about this one! We reached out to the school to ask a few questions that weren’t in the description and they were very willing to provide answers to anything we asked. They even sent us the maintenance records for the last 7 years!
There wasn’t really anything saying that we shouldn’t buy this bus, so we decided to go for it!
The Auction
The end of the auction was about a week and a half away and it was very hard to keep our patience. We didn’t want to let other people watching know how interested we were. But, after a few days we couldn’t help it and we placed a small bid. It didn’t take too long for someone else to out bid us. And then someone else outbid them. It was pretty obvious that this was a desirable bus and there were lots of people interested.
Eventually the big day of the end of the auction came. Our nerves were a wreck. We REALLY wanted this bus. We wanted to wait till the very last minute to place a bid, but we couldn’t! After a lot of debate, we put in a bid about $2,000 higher than the current high bid trying to scare off other buyers. But that didn’t work. We got outbid again and we knew this one would come down to a bidding war at the end.
We had our price cap of $5,000 total, so we knew we had to stay calm and collected and not bid above $4,200. This would give us enough of a margin to pay for the bus and the buyer’s premium and still have money to go get it.
The final minutes of the auction came and the bidding war hit. There were definitely a few other buyers who wanted this thing. Fortunately these auctions are set up so they don’t end until there aren’t any bids for 3 minutes if a bidding war takes off. So we knew we wouldn’t be outbid at the last second and loose it all together. The only thing that would stop us from winning was somebody bidding over $4,200.
After a few rounds of thinking we would get it and then somebody outbidding us with a few seconds to go, the action finally tapered off…. And WE WON!!!! Our winning bid came in at $3,800 plus $380 for the buyers premium for a total of $4,180. Not too shabby!
Skoolie Life In Sight
We finally had a clear path to building a skoolie. After a ton of research and learning, searching for a bus, and nerves about the auction, we were really on our path to being nomads. We couldn’t believe we had actually won! All that was left was going to claim our prize, which we’ll talk about next time!
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