2026 Jamboree Splitty 

2026 Jamboree Splitty

2026 Jamboree Splitty

John Manning's Journals

Today Russell, Brian, David and I jumped right into the middle of removing the front spindles, the rear drums and backing plates and cleaning and scraping 60 years of grime and rust from some of the parts. The backing plates are being cleaned in order to prime and paint them before adding all new shoes and hardware. The front spindle are being replaced with newly rebuilt ones. The front backing plates need to be redone also before all new shoes and hardware are installed.

Mike and I started trying to do the brakes today and ran into a lot of rusty, crusty roadblocks. Took us almost an hour to remove the passenger side front shock! Quite the ordeal. I’ll be continuing on removing the old worn out knuckles tomorrow and Saturday and breathing life back into the brake system. New hard lines, master cylinder, shoes, hardware…. Everything. That’s gonna take a while, probably into next week. When that’s all done and we can roll the bus back out of the garage, we’ll start back in on the sanding and general prep for interior paint in both the passenger area and the engine bay.

2026 Jamboree Splitty

2026 Jamboree Splitty

2026 Jamboree Splitty

40 Miles On The Freeway!!

Planned on spending about 2 hours doing the final hose routing/installing on the remote oil filter. The first hose went on easy, 50 minutes? Looking just like I’d hoped. The second hose, not so much. The hose I brought from home was 1-1/2” too short! So had to go to Orielly’s, Ace and NAPA, second trip today for NAPA, before I found hose the right size and strong enough to work.Then discovered the bottom fittings coming out of the oil pump were clocked wrong and the mustache bar modification that was made to allow the bar to fit around the fittings needed work. And that meant the bar had to come down, tools found to allow the bar to be further modified, reclock the fittings, and then reinstalled. Took hours! Had to refill with oil, spin the motor with the coil disconnected to get oil into the new filter and hoses so we wouldn’t starve the bearings of oil, and finally start the engine. So it’s done, looks as good as I hoped, no leaks and hopefully we won’t have to take the mustache bar down ever again. The next step is to start driving the bus. A lot! Need 500 miles of break in before we can declare victory. And it’s now ready to go. Well, it’s still up on the Jack stands I had to put under it today to work on it and was just too tired to remove them when I was done about 3:30 this afternoon. Maybe someone has a spare front driver seat we can temporarily use until our beautiful newly reupholstered seats are ready? Let me know and I’ll meet you at Russell’s and we can get it installed…. Thanks.

This is just a short status report on the Raffle Bus.