Magic School Bus

[jerry123]

So a friend of mine who runs an Art's program for inner city kids and communities in Toronto has been asking me to help setup a recording 'workshop' space that would be basically a small main control room, booth, and a few workstation/edit suites, giving kids a place to be creative/productive.

Laidlaw just donated a school bus to the organization.

It used to be called the Cyberbus and was a rolling classroom. It was gutted and now has 12 'workstations', fully wired for pc's, is in great shape, HVAC is fine, it has industrial power hookups, an ethernet snake, a satellite dish(!), AND a deseil genny underneath. (even I'm jealous of me)

So, finding space being an issue for the recording project and this thing being dropped in our lap... to good to be true, right?

Now, my situation is that this is going to be done on the cheap, it's not for professional use and the gear list will be minimal. The goal is to have the bus in a permenant home in a community which is pretty quiet. It may stay street legal depending on what sort of 'parking' situation we can arrange.

My idea, back to front, is to make a booth in the very back of the bus (6x6), then a small control room, and leave the workstations towards the front.(see attached)

I'm just in the thinking phase right now as I just saw the thing for the first time yesterday.

I've got a few questions if anyone has any input at all:

I'd like to know exactly how rediculous I'm being first of all!

As for the interior construction, like I said, cheap is the theme. It will not need to be treated as a serious studio space, just simple, solid construction.
Would I be able to call a regular contractor to build a small room or construct a wall inside a vehicle?
Are there companies that specialize in converting vehicle interiors in this way?

I've looked at motorhome conversion sites but found mostly kits/diy/crazy guys with power saws.

Also, I've already gotten a lot of awesome info from searching here and I thank all of you for shareing your ground work.

Does anyone have any experience with emergency exits? Idealy, I would put a permenant wall across the door at the back of the bus, if the bus stays on the road and travels at all... would this be an issue? Considering there would be no passengers when in motion, as there are no seats. That I may need to call the city about.

I'm in Toronto if anyone knows of any good local resources.

This is the craziest thing I have ever done and it's for the kids!
I'm pretty much researching how to research this so I hope you can help me make some sense of the project and in the mean time, I will keep searching the site.

Cheers.