Once you have chosen your vehicle for your motor home conversion, the first step for most people is to remove the seats and empty the bus. We were lucky that our Toyota Coaster seats were not too difficult to remove. However, we still wanted to provide some handy information for anyone needing some help. Unlucky for us, the day we decided to start our Toyota Coaster seat removal, was going to be over 45 degrees!
What are the rules with seats in a bus conversion?
Something that can differ between each state in Australia, and definitely something to check before removing the seats; is the amounts of seats, with seat belts required per sleeping berth.
So for example. Shane and I will have a double bed, and our Toyota Coaster bus plan will be made to sleep just 2. This means we are able to remove all but 2 seats. If we were to have enough bedding to sleep 4, we would need to have enough seating with seat belts to match. You cannot have less seats than sleeping berths.
You may be able to move seats by using the current anchorage points. Possibly even change the position of the seats, build your own, or have additional seat belts added. Either way, it is best to chat to an engineer in your state first to make sure what you are doing will be legal and able to be registered as a motor home once complete. It would be so sad to go to all that effort to not be able to register it!
If you are looking for more information for NSW standards to convert a vehicle to a motorhome, have a read of this RMS link. We have constantly referred back to this link while we have been building our home.
What tools do you need?
In our Toyota Coaster bus, we had 5 sets of double seats to remove, 4 single seats, 2 single wheelchair removable seats, and 2 double sets of wheel chair seats.
We started with the standard double seats and the single seats. It was very simple. For most seats, there were 2 bolts in the floor, and 2 bolts in the wall. Each used a 13mm socket to be removed. It only took around an hour in total to remove these seats.
Our Toyota Coaster bus has a wheelchair access and lift at the back of the bus. So the back 2 rows of seats were made to remove easily. We found this out way too late. I won’t tell you how we did it, and will give you the right information instead!
Underneath each seat, there is a lever. Once this is pushed, it undoes the latches which hold the seats in place. This then allows the seats to be removed, and just leaves the mount on the ground.
These mounts of our Toyota Coaster seats are the difficult part to remove.
Each one is bolted with 4 allen key bolts into the ground, and requires a nut to be undone underneath the bus. The easiest way was to start with WD40 to provide some lubrication to the bolts and the nuts underneath. After this, an allen key was held on to the bolts on top, whilst the nut was loosened underneath the bus just enough so we could remove the bolts from the top.
It was not easy. However, we were lucky. Most of these are in the place where our bed is going to located, so we did not need to remove the majority.
For a lot of people, removing the seats can take a long time and be extremely frustrating. From our research, a lot of people need to individually grind out each seat from in the bus, but also underneath.
Considering how long we thought it would take, it wasn’t as bad as expected and the seats were removed. Our next step is to remove the roof, walls and floor in our Toyota Coaster school bus.
Check out all our mistakes from our first day of our bus renovation below –
Now read on to see the fun we got up to next with our school bus conversion heater, floor, roof and wall removal, and how we can help you!
*Literally the only tool required!
