So at this stage the upstairs was complete and the down stairs was virtually in place. A few items still to be covered were:
- Security door for downstairs
- The hatches
- Destination blinds
The hatches were something I’d had quite some time to think about. Apart from the 2 original emergency exit windows I had to somehow fill the 1st and last window. As I mentioned before I had a metal works place make me 2 hatches to fit the left over windows. Now the challenge was to have them suspended open. My first choice was gas struts. Glad I did not go that route. They get in the way of punters and their drinks and it’s surprisingly hard to get the pressures right to have the hatch sit correctly. In the end I opted for good old hooks and cables. It was a little scary to drill into the old windows to fix the hooks but it all worked out well. I stuck to the same principle as before……
KEEP IT SIMPLE!!
With all the hatches sorted I had one major issue to resolve. How to be able to lock the back of our double decker mobile bus bar. Being a Routemaster, we all know the back of it is an open platform you could famously hop on and off of. This is one of the most iconic bits of London transport and I refused to make a big horrid clunky door that would look rubbish. So I opted for a half and half solution. In practice the downstairs bar had be be able to be secured. The upstairs is largely void of valuables so with a small cord at the bottom of the stairs it’s reasonably safe.
How to close the downstairs…..
I didn’t was to modify the bus in any major way but I did have to change it a little. As some of you know there are lots of chrome rails and bars at the back of these buses to insure you can hold on as it trundles down the road. On of these bards had to be altered slightly and was done by a good friend of mine. apart from that I got really lucky…
Except for one! I settled on a security gate. I spent some time finding a company that makes these. I turnes out the market for gates like this is mainly the US so the few companies in the UK charge, BIG! Once I received my security gate I offered it up to the bus and low and behold…..
It went on and functioned without any modifications what so ever!! An unknown in the custom double decker bus bar build world. That was also the last time that happened!!
With this step some decisions had to be made once again. First of all, what do I put in the windowed space. I’ve seen a few other buses that have adverts in there for their business or “Hire Me” but non of that appealed to me. They all tend to look wrong. So, I opted for whatever was in there last when it was actually in service.
Are Routemaster bus destination blinds still available? Of course they are, this is England. You’ll always find some guy in a shed somewhere that makes exactly what you need. In my case this was Squirrel Preservation
A good guy called Stuart totally sorted me out with totally authentic blinds to fit my bus and they look the business. Best not drive around London too muck because I can imagine people getting rather confused.
It wasn’t easy to fit them mind you. Because I was missing the rollers for the blinds themselves I opted to just have the first page of blinds. This way I could fix them in place and leave them there. It took quite a lot of fiddling to get them to hang straight but they’re all in and will remain there as long as I own good old RML2355!
