This is a retired school bus tour showing some features this bus came with from the factory. We have sold all nine of our retired buses to the same company which is unusual. Typically they are auctioned off at the government website one at a time which takes ages to complete. We needed the space in the yard for the new buses fast so the selling price was a package deal and the buyer saved some money.
He wanted to have a look at them first because of previous purchases receiving buses with bald tires. We don’t do that and leave a lot of rubber on these buses when they’re sold. Unless the tire is 80 or 90% they stay on for the sale. Like I mentioned in the video this bus and the others that sold were very good for the fleet operation.
The year 1999 was a good time to buy school buses because of the simplicity of technology back then. The ISC Cummins engines were electronic but basic in design with an accumulator fuel system called CAPS which stands for Cummins Accumulator Pressure System. The fuel pressure gets up over 5,000 psi which is built up with a gear pump integrally driven from the accessory drive gear.
The distributor type injection pump which is also part of the CAPS delivers the high pressure injection at the specified time. There were a few failures of the CAPS assemblies near the end of their lives but over 15 years of bus service that’s not a bad record. Some injectors failed as well but not very often. Compared to some of the other diesel engines on the market these ISC models did well.
The tour in the video could have gone on for another 10 minutes but it’s a quick over view on these bus models. Like I mentioned some of the engineering went south as far as thinking about practicality. There was too much thinking going on in the engineering department and they should have stuck to simple. The new school buses that followed this ER Saf T Liner model covered in the video were a pain to work on …..trying to fix things that should have never happened if some common sense was followed.
Well that’s all I have to say about that and I hope you comment below or if you want to ask a question please feel free to do so. There will be more school bus stuff coming up here on this blog in the near future so stay tuned and join up with us here at mechanicshub.com. It’s a place designed for tech talk and anyone interested in mechanics in general.
