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.
00:03They said, we've got two school buses, but only one parking space.
00:06Can you help us?
00:07We're like, yes, we can.
00:12This topsy-turvy school bus is the handiwork of art car fabricators, the Mutant Brothers.
00:19Oh, it's 24 feet long, and it's 13 feet 1 inch high.
00:24Right.
00:25And it's 14,700 pounds.
00:27I'd say right now the top speed's about 50.
00:32Ooh, man, that's downhill with a tailway.
00:35It was a commission from environmental agency Hazan.
00:39It runs on biodiesel, has a solar panel array, and is used as a mobile classroom.
00:46It started as two individual school buses, and the build posed a few problems.
00:52You figured, all right, well, we'll take two school buses, cut the roof off of both of them,
00:57unbolt one of them from the frame, turn it upside down, and put it on top of the other one.
01:02And that sounds great until you actually have to do that.
01:04And then you start thinking, well, how do you turn a school bus upside down?
01:09So we had to make our own rotisserie.
01:11We got a big, massive piece of pipe, and we bolted some huge pieces of, bigger pieces
01:18of pipe in the school bus, and then ran this pipe right the way down the center, made some
01:24stands.
01:25We would then pull the whole thing up into the air with block and tackle, with chain falls
01:29in each corner, pull the whole thing up into the air, then put these big stands at each
01:35end of this piece of pipe, and then lower it down onto the stands, and then we could
01:39spin the entire bus.
01:42Scariest thing I've ever done at work.
01:43It's pretty nerve-wracking.
01:45It was.
01:46As unique as it might look, this is actually the second Topsy-Turvy bus that's been built.
01:52The Topsy-Turvy bus was originally the idea of Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream,
02:00and he wanted something that would protest government spending, saying it was upside down.
02:04And so he had this artist, Tom Kennedy, in California, build the original Topsy-Turvy
02:09bus.
02:10It 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.
02:20Unfortunately, Tom Kennedy was killed in a surfing accident, so he was unable, obviously,
02:24to 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
02:38the air, and they're like, what the heck is that?
02:40And you get that a lot.
02:42It's like people say, well, what is it?
02:43You know, 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.
02:50You just know they're going to go home and say to their wife or their husband or the family
02:54whoever.
02:55You'll never guess what I saw today, and I'd love to know what it is, how they describe
02:59it.
02:59Almost from the get-go, though, I think we started talking about what's next.
03:03And we love it when people stop by and they have ideas and they tell us, oh, you know
03:07what you should build?
03:07You should build a huge watermelon car or whatever it is.