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
00:00Our client came to us with a problem. They said, we've got two school buses, but only
00:05one parking space. Can you help us? We're like, yes, we can.
00:13This topsy-turvy school bus is the handiwork of Art Car Fabricators, the Mutant Brothers.
00:18Oh, it's 24 feet long, and it's 13 feet, one inch high, and it's 14,700 pounds.
00:29I'd say, right now, the top speed's about 50.
00:32Oh, man, that's downhill with a tailwhip.
00:36It was a commission from environmental agency Hazan. It runs on biodiesel, has a solar panel
00:42array, and is used as a mobile classroom. It started as two individual school buses,
00:49and the build posed a few problems.
00:53You figured, all right, well, we'll take two school buses, cut the roof off of both of
00:56them, unbolt one of them from the frame, turn it upside down, and put it on top of
01:01the other one. And that sounds great, until you actually have to do that, and then you
01:05start thinking, well, how do you turn a school bus upside down?
01:09So we had to make our own rotisserie. We got a big, massive piece of pipe, and we bolted
01:16some huge pieces of bigger pieces of pipe in the school bus, and then ran this pipe
01:21right the way down the center, made some stands. We would then pull the whole thing
01:26up into the air with block and tackle, with chain force in each corner, pull the whole
01:31thing up into the air, then put these big stands at each end of this piece of pipe,
01:37and then lower it down onto the stands, and then we could spin the entire bus.
01:41Scariest thing I've ever done at work.
01:44It's pretty nerve-wracking.
01:45It was.
01:47As unique as it might look, this is actually the second Topsy Turvy bus that's been built.
01:53The Topsy Turvy bus was originally the idea of Ben Cohen from Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream,
02:00and he wanted something that would protest government spending, saying it was upside
02:04down. And so he had this artist, Tom Kennedy, in California, build the original Topsy Turvy
02:09bus. It ended up in the hands of this environmental organization called Hazon, and they get such
02:15a fantastic reaction from it that they decided they wanted another one. Unfortunately, Tom
02:21Kennedy was killed in a surfing accident, so he was unable, obviously, to build it,
02:24so they found us, the Mutant Brothers, and got in touch, and we're like, sure, we can
02:30build that.
02:34People at first just think it's a bus, but then they see the hood and the tires up in
02:37the air, and they're like, what the heck is that? And you get that a lot. It's like, people
02:42say, well, what is it? You know, and what's it for?
02:45I often wonder what it is that people say when they go home after seeing one of these
02:49vehicles. You just know they're going to go home and say to their wife or their husband
02:53or their family, whoever, you'll never guess what I saw today. And I'd love to know what
02:57it is they, how they describe it. Almost from the get-go, though, I think we started talking
03:02about what's next. And we love it when people stop by, and they have ideas, and they tell
03:06us, oh, you know what you should build? You should build a huge watermelon car, or whatever
03:10it is.