Bus Conversion- Day 1

This past Saturday a crew of our producers volunteered some time to help start fixin our bus.

Step 1: Remove the seats and prep for painting.

Here is our crew:

Mike, Levi, Ed, Juli, and Patrick get ready to transform our bus. A few others came by during the day as well, including this little helper:

Special thanks to little Lucy for her hard work, and Wendy for the bag of plums!

It's Ed Robins - our online producer from UC Santa Cruz!

Last time we saw Ed he was wearing a 1 Second Film sandwich board with a megaphone, promoting our presentation at UC Santa Kruz that he had helped set up (flashback #1). We gave him a 1 Second Film shirt for his efforts (flashback #2), which he was still wearing after all these years! He has since graduated college and relocated to LA where he can now help fix up our bus. How cool is Ed?

After removing all the cushions, we found plenty of bubble gum stuck to the bottom of the seats. We also found this guy, who was promptly removed:

The seats turned out to be pretty tough to unbolt cuz you had to locate the nut underneath, and often there were things in the way. So after spending about an hour slowly unbolting 3 seats, we borrowed a metal grinder from our Armory neighbors, the Sidestreet Bus Project. Levi then took care of all 54 seats in about an hour, cutting through the metal with a sparkly scene straight out of Flashdance.

Meanwhile, we worked on stripping of the vinyl school bus lettering to prep the outside for painting. We started trying to peel the lettering off with putty knives, but eventually went to the hardware store to get some acetone, which made it a lot easier to remove the lettering and glue. It still took some time though and a few letters still remain; Ed made nice work of the Unified School district, and gives answer to the question of how cool Ed is:

After a long days work, we had all the seats out, and enjoyed the special zero gravity feature.

Check our flickr set for even more pics of our bus conversion.

BBQ Bus Painting Party!

We are having a BBQ painting party this Saturday to lay down the first coat of paint. Anyone can come!

Paint the Bus with us + BBQ
11am – 5 pm
at The Armory
965 N. Fair Oaks
Pasadena CA

we are parked in the back lot. Let us know if you are coming so we can best prepare. Bring some friends, food to grill, drinks, sunscreen, and wear something you don’t mind getting paint on.

We will be filming for our doc! :)

best to all,

n