Wednesday 8 March 2006

Some Bastard Put Ball Bearings in the Roof.


I drove one of our super duper, brand new, low floor buses on Saturday. Fleet number 18305. Slight problem with this bus. When it was being built somebody at Transbus decided that it would be fun if they dropped a dozen or so ball bearings into the roof space above the driver's head.

So now when you are driving along, every time you brake all these balls roll forward, when you accelerate they all roll back and when you go round a corner or even move in or out slightly they go from side to side. And it is driving me crazy.

The roof panel is fairly large, about 2.4 metres by 1.5 metres and is held in place by about 20 very small screws. When you take something like that out it never goes back exactly right. So I can see the engineering department falling over themselves to remove it just to get rid of these balls. I mean they aren't effecting the safety of the bus, the brakes aren't going to stop working or the steering wheel isn't going to come off in my hands and they have lots of other problems to deal with without bothering about a few balls rolling about above my head that are slowly driving me crazy. Eventually I will drive the damn bus over Berry Head and have done with it. I might even ask the passengers to get off first. If they're lucky.

At lest some one has manage to get the fuellers to reverse the buses onto the bus park. Makes it so much easier to get out in the mornings.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Magnet? Could you stick a few of those at one end, may keep them from rolling around. Onl oter idea was to see of the depot can drill a small hole and squirt some expanding foam...

Stefan said...

I had the same experience as a passenger a while ago - on a National Express coach, if I remember correctly - and you're absolutely right: that sort of thing just drives you crazy. But passengers being driven crazy is one thing, the driver being distracted like that obviously is quite a different matter...

I only just came about your blog (having done a bit of googling after reading Julian Osbourne's latest column in Buses magazine), but I'm sure I'll be back as it's rather interesting and a pleasure to read.