The Geek Crusher home

Happy Halloween from Raggedy Andi and Indian Dave

We covered the doors with sheet metal. Here are the pictures:

Special thanks to Thornton Plumbing and Heating for helping us out!

I promised pictures. Here they are.

I’ll start with the pics from the door and window construction. Dave made frames for the 2 back doors as well as the sliding door. We insulated them, made windows and then covered them with sheet metal.

Door and window construction:

Before we bought the truck, we were proud owners of a 90 passenger 1976 Bluebird school bus. That was what we were originally intending to turn into our mobile office, but it wasn’t the most economical choice. Gas mileage was ridiculous. It was too big to park anywhere. It was old and needed some work. It just wasn’t the smarter option for us. We sold it and put the money into buying the Geek Crusher.

I was going through some of my pictures the other day and came across a bunch of pictures from when we had the bus. I thought i might as well post them here for fun.

The laminate flooring is all installed.

I am testing out the new floors.

And even further testing the floors.

In order to cut the laminate flooring to size, Dave magically converted his skill saw into a table saw. It may not have been the safest idea ever, but we make do with what we have to work with.

Now that we’ve gotten back into working on the Crusher regularly we’re making great progress. Well, Dave is making most of the progress while I’m working on keeping the websites going that are paying for the project.

Dave got most of the wiring all figured out. We’re going to have 3 outlets on each side of the truck, which should be sufficient. Now we will put the roof back in place and install sheet metal on the walls - thanks to Thornton Plumbing and Heating. We’re thinking laminate flooring for the floors. I tried to buy it online thinking I good get hooked up with a good deal, but turns out that shipping 80 square feet of flooring will cost $150 so we decided to look into other options. Looking on craigslist.org i noticed a lot of people tend to over-buy when doing flooring projects and we found some people selling their extras for pretty cheap. We haven’t bought anything yet, but i think that’s a purchase we will be making soon.

Now we’re starting to plan out the layout and decorating of the mobile office. Once we get the floors/walls in place we are going to take another small trip to try out a few set-ups to see what works best.

Our first journey:

So, the mobile office isn’t done yet, but since we have all the major components for powering everything, we figured we’d take it out for a little mini-trip.

Destination: Brighton, Utah

We loaded up some make-shift desks, power strips, laptops, lawn chairs, snacks and of course, a bottle of wine to celebrate our first trip. We headed up the canyon where we picked up a hitchhiker. He was a schizophrenic guy named Tom. We gave him a lift up to his cabin.

We got up to Brighton. Luckily, the resort has wireless internet so we parked right up by the lodge. At this point we realized that the metal cage we were in very effectively blocked out all wireless internet access. We rearranged the desk situation so we were closer to the window. Success. We set up shop and went to work. I’ve found I’m much more productive when I’m working from exciting places. We opened the back doors so we had a perfect view of the mountains. It was a little chilly, but we brought hoodies and blankets so it wasn’t too bad.

This little trial run gave us a chance to see what was needed/needed to be fixed to effectively run our office. The internet thing will be an issue - especially once we get the wall up in the cab. Dave will run some sort of antenna on the roof so we can pick up a signal. Everything went pretty well. We had a productive day and it gave us the motivation needed to get back to work on the truck.

We took some time off from working on the truck. I moved out of my old house and into a new place, so I took a week off to move and get settled. I used the truck to haul all of my crap. It’s coming in handy aready.

We got quite a bit done before the break, just just never got around to posting anything about it. We got the floor installed as well as the walls. Gary (who is now my new roommate) isntalled support beams in the cieling. These will support the sort of “upper level” pop-out sleeping area we will be isntalling later on. Dave is working on assembling the door that will divide the cab from the back of the truck as well as getting all the wiring figured out. Here are some pictures of the progress up to this point.

It’s been a couple days since I’ve written, so there is a lot to catch up on. First, Dave and Gary took off the back bumper and welded on a new extended bumper which will hold the generator:

We finished painting the walls and the floor with the insulating paint:

We got the wood and insulation to line the floor and ceiling:

We got the whole floor installed:

It’s hard to see in the picture, but i painted a smily face on Dave’s back. Now he has a tan line from it.

Oh, and we couldn’t have made it through the day with out a couple injuries: