It currently latches from the outside, so it’s not usable as an emergency exit without moving the hasps to the inside. It’s very heavy and the handle is high up, so not everyone I know is capable of lowering it. With the hasps inside, in a fire one could unlatch it and push it open to let it fall to the ground; but in other use, it would require two people (inside and out) or a winch to open carefully. It just doesn’t work for me.

First Junkyard Trip

Last Monday on my way home from a holiday trip to Lawrence, I stopped at the junkyard between Newton and Walton to look around. I hadn’t planned the visit and had neither target dimensions nor a tape measure with me; but I quickly found a bus that suggested a return trip was worthwhile.

This Bluebird appears to have been through a fire and then filled with crap. The amount of random garbage inside reflects the amount of random garbage throughout the junkyard, which is why I call it a junkyard instead of a proper salvage yard.

The door handle says “Bluebird” on it. I’d probably replace the Phillips screws with carriage bolts so it wouldn’t be so easy to dismantle from the outside, and I’d intend to add a lock of some sort.

More garbage, yay!

The deadbolt mechanism has a big red safety handle on it. I expect I could rebuild this with something more, shall we say, subtle, while retaining the ease and obviousness for exit in a real emergency.

Second Junkyard Trip

Saturday morning Jonathan and I headed back to the junkyard to bring home a door. After a quick measurement showed that the door I’d already found would fit my bus, we wandered around for an hour looking at all the wondrous crap and searching for other donor buses.

Here’s a little bit of the flavor of the better-kept parts of the junkyard — an actual path with waist-high weeds, random stuff, and a glorious vintage bus that would regrettably require reconstruction more than mere restoration.

Bowling trophy? Hardly. That’s a 40-gallon steam-jacketed tilting kettle. By way of perspective for the size of this thing, that’s a wringer washing machine to the left and a lawnmower-size engine to the right.

The kettle lists for $26,000 and can be had for $12,000 used. The full set of technical specifications from the manufacturer is available as well.

This particular kettle is missing the rolling stand and the gauges and hoses are corroded and weathered, but the stainless kettle itself is immaculate. It might be hard to press back into service in a commercial kitchen, but Lawrence’s wife is interested in it for a dye vat for her fiber arts. I’m guessing when I go back, Lawrence will come along to negotiate.

Here’s the junk barn in the junkyard. Anything here look familiar?

We weren’t able to find any more Bluebird buses, so we returned to the yellow, purple, and soot-colored one I’d already found and removed the door. It was so warm out that our hands were too sweaty to get a good grip on our (good) screwdrivers, so we had to use the cordless drill to take out all the Phillips screws holding the hinge. I expect I’ll replace them with (real) rivets or carriage bolts as well.

I paid $100 for the door.

Test-Fitting the Door to the Bus

Whoever reworked the door took the chrome handle that I think one uses while climbing in the emergency exit and welded it above the new doorrampstairs — I’m not quite sure why. At any rate, it interferes with the placement of a proper door, so Jonathan and I took turns cutting it off and grinding down the welds.

Here’s the new door set in place. It’s a good fit!

It sat a little cockeyed because the hinge hangs below the bottom of the door, but it’ll mount straight.

From the inside, it already looks so much nicer than the wooden steps mounted to the current door. I hadn’t thought I cared about having windows out the back and I had planned to leave the (future) bathroom door(s) closed most of the time; but this view makes me think I should plan things so the bathroom door(s) can stand open while not in use. I love this!

That Big Hole

My brother and I looked over the remaining framework and the welding that was done to convert the door. I need to do some further examination, but our direction is that it may be easier and give a better result to go back to the junkyard and remove the entire rear corner from the salvage bus, cutting ribs to replace what was removed from mine and leaving factory-formed sheet metal still riveted to the ribs wherever possible. That’s going to be a chore.

Should have bought a bus that didn’t come pre-stupided.

Expenses

Currently if the bus is closed, I have to open the heavy rear door to get in.

I don’t have a good picture of just the door, but the rod going horizontally across from the handle in the center of the bus to the door (hidden behind the cabinet) mechanically holds the door closed (by design) when the handle is latched in the closed position. As long as the handle stays latched, you can’t open the main passenger door from the outside.

With my highly-skilled momentum technique, I can close the front door from the outside so I don’t have to walk around, open the rear door, walk through, close the front door, walk around, and reclose the rear door; but once done, I then have to do the hokey-pokey to get back in.

I’d really like to be able to lock the passenger door and have a way to get in from the outside. And unlike many other bus-RV converters, I really don’t want to replace the bus door with an RV door — I’m not out to hide the fact that the vehicle started life as a bus. Until I have good reason to feel otherwise, I’d like to keep the accordion-fold door.

I’d love to motorize the door and add electronic entry — although at least in the long term, I need to have a purely mechanical way to get in, as backup in case something goes wrong with the motor.

Automotive Power Window Motor

“Neighbor Dan” has a pile of removed auto parts in the corner of his shop, and a guy comes by occasionally to haul the pile to a scrapyard. Dan has offered me anything I want out of the pile, and he says he has three more of these power window motors that I haven’t found yet. I’ll keep digging.

I don’t know that this is the motor to use for my power door, but it bears consideration.

It looks pretty obvious why it was replaced — the cable is all messed up and broken where it wraps around the spool.

With the jammed-up cable spool taken care of, the output shaft spins at almost two rotations per second. That’s a little fast if I were going to attach it directly to the door-opening handle or use it to replace the handle altogether. If I were to do that, I might use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to slow it down.

The motor coil resistance is 1Ω or less, so the motor draws at least an amp and I’d need a pretty hefty FET to drive it. (A compensating factor is that the motor would normally have a pretty short duty cycle, so the FET wouldn’t have long to heat up.)

Alternatively, I could use the motor with the spool and cable (maybe one of the others isn’t as messed up) and use a larger pulley / spool on the handle end to “gear down” the rotational speed.

I’ve considered that I could remove the manual handle, do away with the connecting rod, and fabricate an entirely new means to close the door. But as it’s constructed now, the rod does double-duty closing the door and “locking” it shut once closed. If I did away with it, I’d have to recreate that functionality on my own.

I’m Open to Something Completely Different

If someone knows of a better way to lock and unlock a bus front door from the outside, or motorize an accordion-fold door, I’m all ears.

The bus has a locking gas cap but didn’t come with the key. Fortunately the cap was unlocked, so I could at least fill gas. Also fortunately, I found in the glovebox the original gas cap. So last night I put the original cap onto the gas tank and brought home the locking cap to make a key.

While taking off the gas cap and fishing out the retaining wire, I noted that this fill spout has nothing for the lock to lock against; so there’s no way I can see for this cap to actually lock. So why did someone replace the original with a locking cap? Because of the retaining chain — the original cap didn’t have one, there’s no good place to set the cap while filling, and the retaining chain is very handy to keep the cap captive.

That left me with a removed locking gas cap and no reason to make a key for it. But I already had the cap loose; so why not go ahead with an evening’s keymaking entertainment.

Wafer Tumbler Locks

I guessed correctly that the cam lock would be a wafer tumbler lock. Many thanks go to Matt Blaze’s Notes on Picking Pin Tumbler Locks for giving me the terminology after the fact to describe what I did last night.

From upper right to left, the tumbler lock has a plug (4) that rotates in a shell (3). The cam (2) mounts on the back end of the plug and is held in place by a machine screw (1). The bracket at the bottom is the sheet metal I used to make my new key.

The plug has a keyway running through it lengthwise. Crossing the keyway are slots for the wafers, which the springs in the slots press toward the bottom of the lock.

The wafers have slots through them at different heights (in this case, only two different heights among my five wafers); the key fits through the slots and its “bitting” (mountains and valleys) press against the ends to raise the wafers against the spring pressure. The correct key will raise each different wafer to the correct height to align its ends with the circumference of the plug, allowing the plug to rotate in the shell.

Making a key for a cheap wafer lock is easy because the lock is easily disassembled and the mechanism is visible (unlike pin tumbler locks). One can simply insert a key blank, mark the wafer positions on the blank, and file the blank until it works — that is, until the wafers are all aligned in the plug.

In this case, making a key was even easier than usual — the keyway has no ridges (“wards”) to require the key to have grooves, so I didn’t have to get a real key; I just used a thick piece of sheet metal. For arcade games that came without keys, I’ve taken the locks to the hardware store to buy a matching key blank and then taken it home to make the bitting.

Making the Key

First I hacksawed a key-sized section off of the metal bracket, sawed it into a key-like shape, and filed the burrs off the edges. I made the length such that the key head would fully seat against the plug face without the end of the key bottoming out against the end of the keyway.

I filed the key so it was narrow enough to fit through the wafers’ holes, then inserted the key into the plug with the wafers removed and marked the positions between wafers. I repeat the marking during the filing (bitting) process; but it’s easier to do the first time with the wafers out.

Then I reinstalled the wafers and inserted the key blank into the keyway. Because the leading end of the key wasn’t tapered yet, it didn’t raise the wafers for me like the tip of a finished key, so I used a small screwdriver to poke each wafer until its hole aligned with the key blank.

Here you can see the effect of the difference in hole positions among the wafers — the flat, unbitted key raises the wafers to all different heights.

I removed the blank and filed it down enough to make the lowest wafers flush with the surface of the plug.

This represents the maximum width of the key bitting — no part will be thicker than this.

I reinserted the key and remarked the wafer positions — in particular, I marked around the two that still needed to be lowered. I then used a round rat-tail file to file grooves into the appropriate positions on the key blank until the key fit the lock with all of the wafer ends (almost) exactly flush with the surface of the plug.

Unfortunately I neglected to take a picture of the plug with the finished key lifting the wafers to the right heights. Use your imagination.

For convenience on my keyring (which is stupid since I can’t lock the gas cap anyway so there’s no point in carrying this key, but whatever), I rounded the corners of the key head with hacksaw and file.

The finished key operates the reassembled lock as smoothly as any consumer-grade commercially-produced key.

And the Cam is Extra-Useless

The lock can be installed in the gas cap in two orientations 180° apart. The lock shell and plug have stops to allow only 90° of rotation. Reinstalling a lock is always a bit of a puzzle to make sure it’s going in the right orientation.

But in this case, I’m not sure there is a right orientation. Here’s the locked position, in which I can remove the key. (The lock could also be installed rotated 180°.)

Here’s the unlocked position, in which I can’t remove the key.

So, uh, splain to me how one of those is locked and one is unlocked?

This isn’t a quarter-turn gas cap like on my cars; it’s a threaded cap that screws onto the end of the filler pipe. My best plan for this cap would be if one were to weld (before installation, obviously not on an existing tank) a washer onto the end of the filler pipe with the same outer diameter as the pipe and 1/2″ smaller ID, and change the stops in the lock so it moves the cam through 180° rotation.

Then the lock’s cam could rotate toward the outside of the cap to engage behind the tube’s washer, preventing removal of the gas cap; or toward the inside of the cap to clear the edge of the washer, allowing removal of the cap.

Alternatively, one could weld (again before installation) a ridge onto the inside of the filler pipe, thick enough that the cam would stop against it when in the locked position, preventing rotation of the cap on the threads.

As it is, I just don’t see how this cap could actually lock. Perhaps the cam actually reaches the interior surface of the pipe, and there’s enough friction (and jamming action from the cam) to prevent turning. I guess I’ll see if I can find some magic behavior when I reinstall it.

Oh and By the Way

Ich rieche wie Benzin
Einen Kraftstoff wie Benzin