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.
00:19It'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.
00:31Oh 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.
00:46It started as two individual school buses and 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 right
01:22the way down the centre, made some stands, we would then pull the whole thing up into
01:27the air with block and tackle with chain force in each corner, pull the whole thing up into
01:31the air, then put these big stands at each end of this piece of pipe and then lower it
01:37down 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 down
02:04and so he had this artist Tom Kennedy in California build the original Topsy Turvy bus. It ended
02:11up in the hands of this environmental organisation called Hazon and they get such a fantastic
02:16reaction 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 so they found us, the Mutant Brothers, and got in touch and we're like, sure, we
02:30can build that.
02:34People at first just think it's a bus but then they see the hood and the tyres up in
02:38the air and they're like, what the heck is that?
02:40And you get that a lot, it's like, people say, well what is it, you know, and what's
02:44it for?
02:45And you 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, how they describe it.
02:59Almost from the get go though I think we started talking about what's next and we love it when
03:04people stop by and they have ideas and they tell us, oh you know what you should build?
03:08You should build a huge watermelon car or whatever it is.