Quirky mechanics have created a ‘Topsy Turvy’ vehicle - by fusing two American school buses on top of each other. Brit Steve Braithwaite, 55, and his business partner Tom Brown, 56, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, took inspiration from a famous ice-cream maker for the wacky bus. The mammoth build took more than six months and required the pair to design their own machinery that would allow them to flip one bus on top of the other.
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MotorTranscript
00:00 Our client came to us with a problem. They said we've got two school buses but only one
00:05 parking space. Can you help us? We're like yes we can.
00:13 This topsy-turvy school bus is the handiwork of Artcar fabricators, the Mutant Brothers.
00:19 It's 24 feet long and it's 13 feet one inch high and it's 14,700 pounds.
00:29 I'd say right now the top speed is about 50.
00:31 Oh man, that's downhill with the tailwhip.
00:36 It was a commission from environmental agency Hazan. It runs on biodiesel, has a solar panel
00:42 array and is used as a mobile classroom.
00:46 It started as two individual school buses and the build posed a few problems.
00:53 You figured, alright, well we'll take two school buses, cut the roof off of both of
00:56 them, unbolt one of them from the frame, turn it upside down and put it on top of the other
01:01 one. And that sounds great until you actually have to do that and then you start thinking,
01:06 well how do you turn a school bus upside down? So we had to make our own rotisserie.
01:12 We got a big massive piece of pipe and we bolted some huge pieces of, bigger pieces
01:18 of pipe in the school bus and then ran this pipe right the way down the center, made some
01:24 stands, we would then pull the whole thing up into the air with block and tackle with
01:29 chain force in each corner, pull the whole thing up into the air, then put these big
01:33 stands at each end of this piece of pipe and then lower it down onto the stands and then
01:39 we could spin the entire bus.
01:42 Scariest thing I've ever done at work.
01:44 It's pretty nerve wracking.
01:45 It was.
01:47 As unique as it might look, this is actually the second Topsy Turvy bus that's been built.
01:53 The Topsy Turvy bus was originally the idea of Ben Cohen from Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream
02:00 and he wanted something that would protest government spending saying it was upside down.
02:04 And so he had this artist, Tom Kennedy in California, build the original Topsy Turvy
02:09 bus. It ended up in the hands of this environmental organization called Hazon and they get such
02:15 a fantastic reaction from it that they decided they wanted another one. Unfortunately Tom
02:21 Kennedy was killed in a surfing accident so he was unable obviously to build it so they
02:25 found us, the Mutant Brothers, and got in touch and we're like, "Sure, we can build
02:30 that."
02:34 People at first just think it's a bus but then they see the hood and the tires up in
02:37 the air and they're like, "What the heck is that?" And you get that a lot. It's like people
02:42 say, "Well what is it?" You know, "What's it for?"
02:45 I often wonder what it is that people say when they go home after seeing one of these
02:49 vehicles. You just know they're going to go home and say to their wife or their husband
02:53 or their family, whoever, "You'll never guess what I saw today." And I'd love to know what
02:57 it is, how they describe it.
02:59 Almost from the get-go though, I think we started talking about what's next. And we
03:03 love it when people stop by and they have ideas and they tell us, "Oh, you know what
03:07 you should build? You should build a huge watermelon car," or whatever it is.
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