A mission from ISIS!

As many of my regular readers know, I’m a real school bus driver, driving real children to real schools in real life. Can’t get more real than that - actually you can. I drive special needs children to school. These are the children with various issues that mean that an ordinary bus is not suitable. Don’t take that the wrong way - many of them are particularly gifted children whose problem may be emotional and behavioral rather than anything else. That, however, is beside the point.

Driving around my routes I see driving behavior that causes me to wonder whether there are drivers out there on a mission for ISIS to cause chaos, to cause injury and to cause death. Alternatively there could be some McDonalds out there that I don’t know about, issuing free driving licenses with every Happy Meal. If a day goes by when I don’t see some road user doing something suicidal, I’m relieved. Today there was somebody in a pickup truck weaving through the traffic, causing cars to brake and swerve as he cut in front of them. No use of turn signals, of course. Then there was the guy following me, 6 inches behind my rear bumper who didn’t understand that’s why I kept slowing down and so kept blowing his horn. Sorry, mate, I’m not speeding up til you speed your happy arse away from my back bumper. I can do without being rear-ended.

Being a bus driver means I also know more about vehicles than most. Two weeks ago the local dealership gave me a horrendous price on replacing what boiled down to a $1.50 part wrapped in plastic. By the time I had done a deal with the Devil it had cost me $330. Now my car is showing me a check engine light. Reading the error using the tried and true method of turning the car on, waiting 3 seconds then pumping the acellerator 5 times in 5 seconds then waiting 7 seconds before pressing the acellerator for 10 seconds then releasing, I read the code. The code flashes out in 4 blocks and came up as 443 which is something to do with the vacuum pump switch.

Having had to do business with the Devil and being determined not to do it again, I bought my car manual for a massive $25 and will henceforth attempt my own repairs. The part needed is $65 online but I’ll get the car spares shop to check my diagnosis with their reader while getting the needed part from them. Fortunately my bus has no built-in electronics. It’s pretty much pre-electronics which means diagnosis is simpler and there’s a load less to go wrong. Honestly the things that go wrong in my car are all to do with the onboard diagnostics rather than actual problems.

The manual for my bus or rather for the DT466 engine is somewhat daunting at about $150. Carpenter went out of business years ago but left a handy circuit diagram on the cockpit wall. Unhelpfully they ran their wires underneath the roof panels. As for the transmission, it’s a standard Alison 542 or similar. I don’t expect to have to work on that or the engine.

Today is a day off from work but I’m not doing anything today. I’m still exhausted from work over the last 4 days. One of the major problems with school bus driving is South Carolina’s reluctance to put air conditioning on their busses. On the special needs bus I drive, the children have air conditioning. It doesn’t reach the front though. That means that I have a choice. I can either chug water while I drive and hence chug kiddie germs or I can avoid the kiddie germs and dry out which has the unfortunate side effect of inducing a constipation that can last the whole work week. As my own bus does not have air conditioning but does not have children aboard, I’m luckier in that I don’t have to make a choice between missing days from being sick from preventable airborne germ ingestion or spending the weekend trying to get things working normally again.

Tomorrow the plan is to continue work under the bus on securing the wiring to the underside of the bus and continue on to pass the wires through the floor at the back of the bus. Once that’s done, I can work on the electrics at the back. Alternatively I can start to install my electronic door unlocker keypad. It depends what I feel like doing, to be brutally honest. I need to extend the wires under the bus as some are a shade too short. That’s probably going to be spade connectors. Soldering would be nice but spade is more practical if I’m doing this on my favorite piece of roadway.

And now the obligatory photo down the aisle of my bus.

It’s not too bad. Still a bit cluttered with construction debris in places but it’s getting there. If I feel so inclined, I might even forgo getting under to install my wiring and just concentrate on building a battery holder for my Harbor Freight 35AH battery. Although I don’t really want to weld to the bus body, I think I might have to weld a couple of brackets in order to hold my battery more securely.