As soon as our parts come in, we get right to work assembling and installing the engine. Then, fine tuning, minor adjustments, and we’re up and running!

While we’re waiting for parts to come in, we’ve been working on a few other projects. We have a piece of foam that we’ve been using, but it’s really terrible and we need to buy a real mattress topper. So I’m repurposing the foam to fit the bus bed.

We’ll only use it for a few days as we deliver the bus to Michigan, but neither of us sleep well on the bed in there (it’s so hard to find foam that is firm enough for a couch, but soft enough for a mattress). It was just a quick and dirty sewing job to encase the foam between two old bedsheets, where I moved the sewing machine instead of the foam so ended up with the seam leaping around and looking ugly. Close enough!

Half the parts arrived Tuesday, the rest came on Wednesday afternoon. We were back in business as soon as FedEx came through on Wednesday. First up, main rear seal.

After that, I could reassemble the flywheel and clutch.

The transmission was surprising easy to reattach, considering it took us two days last time. Obviously we learned our lesson – the trick we used last time was a paint marker wrapped in electrical tape to function as a transmission shaft alignment tool. It took a little wiggling and manual turning to get the splines lined up, but compared to our first go-round 4 years ago we looked like professional mechanics this time.

Then we were ready to start putting things back in! Starting with the fuel system. We replaced the fuel filler neck, I think it’s pretty obvious why we had a strong gasoline smell every time we filled up – look at those cracks!

Kyle attached everything to the gas tank and got the tank back in place, and replaced the firewall to keep the tank are separate from the engine area.

At that point, we were ready to start lifting the bus and moving the engine/transmission assembly back underneath it, so we took a quick dinner break. Apparently Kyle’s dad was about to come help us, but he saw us head back to the boat and thought we were wrapped up for the night. Not even close!

We spent the next several hours moving things in tiny increments. Jack up each side of the bus one notch. Move the engine a little bit. Make a tiny adjustment. Jack the transmission up a tiny bit. Jack up each side of the bus one notch. Try to slide the engine in another inch. Make a tiny adjustment. Eventually we got the transmission shaft in place, and one engine mount bolt on each side, so we no longer needed lifts to hold up the engine or transmission, everything was adequately attached. We called it a night.

The next morning we got right back into it. Kyle reattached various hoses, wires, gas lines, and electrical connections. While the distributor was still easy to get to, I did a valve adjustment.

We smoked the vacuum system – any tiny vacuum leak puts a huge damper on performance, so Kyle takes an oily rag, lights it on fire in a paint can, then uses an air compressor to drive the smoke into the vacuum lines and we look for any signs of smoke leaking out. The only leak we found was the valve cover, which would probably solve itself once we started running, because I’d just had it opened up and put a new seal in.

At some point in the day, we popped over to the post office to send our absentee ballots back to South Carolina. We might be busy, but we’re not too busy to vote.

After lunch, the bus was ready for the big test: would she start? We started running through checklists to see if we’d forgotten anything – was the alternator attached (we forgot that last time), did we put fuel back in the tank, etc.

“You connected the clutch cable, the accelerator cable?”

“Accelerator cable? I thought you did that?!”

“I was going to, but then I got distracted…”

And then proceeded to install about 8 things above the accelerator cable connection. Oops, sorry love. My bad.

Right off the bat, she wouldn’t even turn over. Forgot to reattach the battery. Then, she’d rev and rev but never fire up. We’d missed a ground, forgot to plug in the air flow meter, and never tightened the engine mounting bolts. After that we were in business!

We needed to adjust the points and the timing, but we needed to move the bus outside first. That was a little touch and go, she kept dying when returning to idle. We finally got her in a parking spot and did the points and timing.

Then we took her for a little joy ride. We took a back country road out, then hopped on the freeway to return. As we start pushing 65mph, I asked Kyle if he’d put the gas cap back on. Oops. Missed that too.

Back to the shop for an oil change, Kyle adjusted the rear brakes, I aired up the tires. We jumped right in to the next big thing: preparing for a thousand mile road trip.

It had already been a long day, but we plan to leave tomorrow morning. Kyle started putting together a toolkit to bring, while I sorted through our pile of stuff to decide what we needed to bring to Michigan. We’re bringing some stuff up to store (my wedding dress), some things to give away (a welder), and of course all the things we’ll need for a few days of camping. I left Kyle to play Tetris with the big pile of stuff that somehow all needs to fit in the bus while I prepped dinner. We still haven’t packed clothes or toiletries yet.

So to recap, we’ve:

• Checked the vacuum system for leaks
• Adjusted the valves
• Adjusted the points
• Adjusted the timing
• Adjusted the brakes
• Oil change
• Checked tire pressure

What else do we need to do? Are we ready for a thousand mile road trip?