Early Crown Photographs

Somehow, I managed to let myself be talked into posting some detailed early photos of work on the Crown. I guess it makes sense, if I can't post any new progress (since there hasn't been any), then I might as well show what I've already done. Come to think of it, that's much easier than actually working on the bus anyway...

The first thing I did after getting the bus home was to sweep it out, remove junk and debris, investigate and take photos of all of the nooks and crannies, and try to get some idea of what I was going to do with it now that I had it. In this photo looking forward, you can see that the band saw that I hauled back from my friend's house in Portland is still strapped to the grab bar at the front of the bus. Date on this photo and the next would be Feb 20, 1995.

Here you can see that I've pulled up the access plate in the floor to see what's under it (some radiator hoses).

One of the big attractions of this bus was the heavy-duty chassis and running gear. No worries about overloading this rig, and it's undeniable that these tandem-dual, fully driven axles have lots of macho appeal.

Once my curiousity was satisfied, it was time to actually work on the bus. Since it was still crammed into a corner of my driveway and sitting at an odd angle, I busied myself with rubbing off all of the black spray paint that the previous owner had used to obliterate the school bus and district lettering on the bus. I didn't stop when the spray paint was gone, but kept rubbing with the lacquer thinner-soaked rag until the lettering itself was removed as well.

Here's what the area alongside my driveway looked like when I bought the bus, a Rambler graveyard. I shipped the two left-hand cars off to a classic-car salvage yard (the one on the far left under the tarp was a rare 9-passenger 1960 station wagon, it was later rescued by a collector who restored it), and moved the right hand one to another part of the yard so that fill dirt could be brought in to level the area.

The fill is almost complete here, the bus is parked where the cars were previously, and the area in front of the bus is still receiving dump truck loads of dirt and gravel. In all 18 truckloads of fill were brought in during this phase of the project. The area under the Rambler crypt had previously gotten two loads years before, so the total was now 20 loads, or about 180-200 cubic yards.

I installed an electric service panel to run power tools and then got to work removing the interior of the bus. All of this junk was either reused or recycled. Still working on getting rid of the last of the spray paint and lettering.

Close to being stripped to the exterior skin. I've cut the rear bench seat out and removed the rearmost section of flooring.