Electrical Adventures

October 2020 Update

The first thing I did with the bus in its new home was call around to try and find a cheap (~$200/year) insurance policy for the bus. I tried the company that Peter used to insure a bus of his own a few years back, as well as the dedicated antique vehicle insurance company that Ken had recently used for his. The former proved useless as the employee that Peter had dealt with was no longer there, and the latter which Ken used required the insurer to be 26 years of age or older with 10 years of driving experience, a requirement which I wouldn’t meet for another 3 years. The only insurance company that would cover the bus under my name was a facility company that charged an annual premium of over $1500 a year as opposed to the mere $200 or so a year that the other two companies would have charged. With winter soon coming and me not planning to drive the bus in the winter, I decided to hold off on this for now and make a decision in the springtime.

Meanwhile, back at the bus, the primary focus at this point was fixing our long endured issue with the driver’s start button not working. Originally thinking it may have been a faulty start circuit relay in the rear apparatus box, I got a new one ordered off Ebay. I removed the old relay and took it home to test, sure enough proving it faulty, and later installed the new one with hopes that this would solve the problem.

To my disappointment, it didn’t. So it became clear that multiple components of the start circuit had been faulty. After I told my dad about this, my dad, a highly experienced auto mechanic, for the first time decided to help out with the bus. I took my dad to 1130 on three days throughout the month of October and the two of us spent hours each day troubleshooting the issue. This included unfastening and refastening wire connections, cleaning points of electrical contact, testing fuses, following wires to their origin, and using a multimeter to test voltage or resistance of each and every little conductor we could find (seemingly hundreds) that appeared to be related to the bus’ start circuit.

Despite our efforts, and a lot of learning about the bus’ electrical system, we just could not find the cause of the problem. We did however narrow it down after finding out that my new start circuit relay (and everything past it) works properly, as the engine fired up when we jumped power to that relay. We also discovered that everything up to the Rear Start switch (the second last stage of the start circuit prior to the relay, according to the bus’s maintenance manual) was working properly as the switch had current flowing to it, and also out of it, when we held it in the “Start” position. Therefore the problem has to lie somewhere between that switch and the start circuit relay. This will have to be investigated by a heavy maintenance shop and a qualified electrician.

Till then, my dad and I decided to resort to a makeshift fix by simply linking the driver’s start button directly to the starter solenoid itself, to be able to start the engine with the use of the driver’s button at the front. We wired the button to a current source, attached a long wire to the button, threaded it down the left side of the bus’ interior and hid it underneath the wall mounts of the forward facing seats, fed it through a new hole drilled in the engine bulkhead, and attached it to the starter solenoid. We tested the setup and it worked to successfully start the engine from the driver’s station, and everything was then put back together including the engine access panel and the rear bench seat. 

In between this frustrating subproject, I took 1130 out for several quick drives around the area throughout the month of October, one of which I did on a very windy Fall afternoon during which the aft roof hatch (which was open at the time and only secured by one of its two brackets) blew off in the wind! I realized this only after I returned the bus to the storage lot and went looking for it in my car afterwards, eventually finding it on the side of a dirt road not too far away. Unfortunately one of the two plastic brackets mounting the hatch to the ceiling of the bus had broken into several pieces and a new one will have to be scavenged from somewhere. Until then, I was able to securely fasten the hatch with the other (emergency release) bracket, and the hatch remains in place just fine so long as it is closed.