Right - as I tell you this, you have to remember that I had specced everything so far on the bus - lowered, narrowed front beam, lower-profile tyres, deeper sump, and all the living stuff and especially the leisure batteries on the left-hand side. The other thing to remember is that this build was really pushing some laws of physics and it just didn't work in the spec I'd imagined.
But it was all wrong. To be honest, I knew within the first 100 yards of street-driving that something was amiss. Well plenty actually, but I thought I could 'drive around' most of it. Which I did, but jeez it was stressful - and that's not what I wanted.
It looked cool as fk, but was really impractical. No ground clearance, difficult steering, a sense that the bus was 'listing' to the left, and that during a right hand turn at anything over 30mph you got the sense that the front-wheel was tucking under. 'Kin terrifying going past trucks (anticipating the suck inwards and then the blow outwards - and the same in reverse if a fast truck came past you....). Bad wandering and tramlining & a horrible way with any road imperfections (not that there are any in the UK of course....). And with a sticky centre to the steering, this meant that if you weren't really careful, you'd over correct and set up the most horrible 'weave' across the road as the momentum slopped from one side to the other.
I knew there were a load of things that weren't right, but we needed to isolate, diagnose and fix the problems. Then we needed a plan of action.
So after we got back, I took the bus to Center Gravity - to Chris. The Genius of suspension. He's set up both my 911s and had transformed them completely. And he has a T3, so he knows his way around a bus. He immediately confirmed all I'd noticed and said that it was not an easy drive.
And we started by weighing the bus, & corner-weighting the bus.
A standard bus should come in at around 1,495 kg, with a payload of 755 kg & thus a total of 2,250 kg. Mine came in at 1,767 kg and we projected a 4 adult and luggage payload of 340 kg - totaling at 2,170 kg. So heavy, but not stupid heavy. However, the L/R distribution was not so good, with a 54 / 46 split, and a similar corner-weight split. It should be pretty much 50/50.
So first up was to see if we could shift some weight over to the RHS. The difference we were looking to move was around 50 kg, and as it happens, the 2 leisure batteries are 27 kg each (!) so moving them over to the RHS & the starter battery to the LHS meant that we would get pretty much spot on where we needed to be.
However, this meant some metal-work to be done, so Johnson's cut out some of the RHS, fitted a new 'sunk' battery tray in there and we shifted the weight over.
A really quality job, and that pretty much immediately sorted the weight distribution, and was a major contributor to getting the corner weights at 50:50 - Nice one Johnson's.
Lesson learned from this bit, is if you're doing this - make sure someone has some way of looking at the weight on your bus. It makes a massive difference and needs to be considered during the build - otherwise it can be a bit pricey to fix afterwards.....
![Sad :-(](./images/smilies/icon_sad.gif)