Brill_C-37M_Bus

The pictured bus isn’t the exact one I’m restoring, but one of her 601 sisters. But if he rode one ACF-Brill military coach during his time in the Army, the King of Rock n’ Roll might very well have been on my bus, too! I’d like to know more of the stories of all the soldiers and their families that rode my bus, but so far I haven’t found much specific. Someday, I hope! -Steven

Beautiful work! And I sympathize with the PA antique paperwork issues. There was a straight up clerk handwriting mistake on my antique registration, which took a while to fix. But considering the vehicle I registered as an antique had been a commercially inspected bus from 1951-2016, it’s certainly strange they would ask you for specifics on gross or unladen weight, when nobody asked me. Good luck, I hope the plate comes in time. Now your photos gave me the motivation to go check some more wiring on mine. Thanks for sharing! -Steven

I’m also working on wiring. Lots and lots of wiring! I’m chasing a short in the gauge lights or sender circuits. And that means crawling underneath. It’s actually kinda nice under my bus, the ground clearance means I can even sit up in some places. I gave the old stateside Korea vet some subdued decoration, and the best occasion-appropriate message I could think of, for last Friday’s somber anniversary. Trying to draw block letters in pseudo-cursive was strange, but it got the feel I wanted. -Steven

I could look for a different replacement, but I’d have to know more about this relay to do that. For instance, at what voltage does it trip and turn off the NOT GEN light? I’d prefer to learn more about the numbering of these different relays, so I can tell if the Cadillac part is the same relay, but repurposed. This listing I found on Delco-Remy’s website doesn’t say much, but does describe it as a “continuous duty” relay, though I’m not sure exactly what difference that makes. http://www.delcoremy.com/find-a-part/product-details/1116845

My ‘51 ACF-Brill has a 12v relay from Delco-Remy. If I understand right, it’s supposed to close and send power to a dashboard “NOT GEN” warning light when the voltage from the generator armature drops below a certain level. There is a short circuit somewhere in this relay or its wiring, so I’m looking for a replacement. The Delco-Remy part number stamped on it is 845, or the longer form of the same number is 1116845. Here’s an edited bit of the wiring schematic showing both kinds of relay in my bus. The 845, on the right, is what I’m wondering about. My question is, I see Delco 845 relays (also shown as 15-845) listed on eBay as a/c relays for ‘70s Cadillacs. Their terminal layout looks different, but are these functionally equivalent? Where is a good place to look for old 1950s Delco-Remy relays? https://www.ebay.com/itm/184409088016 I appreciate any pointers you have to offer. I’ve found spares of the other relay I need, number 797, but can’t find any 845 relays. -Steven

I’m curious too. Since the Red Diamonds (formerly called FBC engines) were production from ‘41 to ‘74, there were a couple incremental changes over the years. Here’s my 1951 RD-450. Lots of the accessories got changed over its service life, but it’s still original. If you find any good sources for new or old stock parts, I’d love to know about it. I’m always looking, and would gladly pass on any leads I find, if I ever get that lucky!

Good luck with the Halloween goal! Personal deadlines like that always seem to work well for me. My project has an RD-450 also, it was a real pleasure to listen as yours make its lap around the block. -Steven

I got a vastly better night photo on my new phone. Maybe turning the interior lights on helped too. Please forgive the sort of double post! -Steven

An unexpected bonus of my bus is all the optional lights Uncle Sam ordered. Finally, I got all the original lights working on the correct circuits again... no more parking lights on all the time! And I just have to share this shot a friend took during a spontaneous night photo shoot. My ‘51 Brill waits at a country crossing for a 1925 St. Louis Car Co. streetcar to pass. -Steven

Sounds like this proposal is a good balance. Everyone talks about the young hiker, but what about preserving the actual history of the bus, not the sad story that co-opted this fine machine long after its retirement? It sounds like there is room for the museum to talk about who built it, who drove it, and what road or public works projects it served on. Telling the entire story makes it well worth the effort to retrieve this rare old piece of history.

That’s an amazing list of cars! As a historical side note, this shows what sort of work the host of this show did. My bus was also at Parish Steel in Reading during the early 1950s... but she was in pieces, just a pile of newly formed steel, getting shipped to Philadelphia for assembly. I found this original stenciling behind the undercoating on the steel frame below the driver’s seat.

1951 ACF-Brill Motors model C-37M 30’ military coach, with a 12v electrical system. She has a standard Stewart-Warner panel, and while the gauges are all from the right time period, I can’t be certain these are the exact right ones. The backlight is just plain little GE 57 bulbs, which shine through slots in the sides of the gauges. A bench test, the lights look similar in the bus, but I’ve never taken a photo of them at night. -Steven

I have a Guide fog light fixture that recently lost its ground connection to the frame of my vehicle. The fog light has worked ever since I first replaced the sealed-beam bulb, but after doing some work on this area, it stopped lighting up. The other side works, and the bulb works when I bench tested it. After checking connections with a continuity tester, it appears the entire fixture has no electrical ground connection to anything else, while the working fog light has continuity to pretty much every other metal part on the bus. I took the bulb out this spring to paint the area around it. While it was out, I also applied paper towels soaked in Evapo-Rust to remove some rust, wire brushed it by hand, and painted the inside with POR-15 rust converting paint. I also tried hammering (hard) on a dent right next to the fixture. I figure any of those could have contributed to losing the ground connection. The + wire (the bus is positive ground) just connects to the Guide fixture’s frame. The fixture is ringed with a rubber gasket, but it bolted to a steel frame piece from the back. Do you think tightening the nut on the inside would help? Would removing it to wire brush the nut and bolt threads make a significant difference? Or is there an entirely different solution I should be looking into? I know I could run a new ground wire, but considering this worked fine until recently, I’d like to get it back to working as original. -Steven

I really don’t understand expecting ordinary old cars to be an investment. Supercars, collector cars, or rarities, I get it, but expecting anything else to leave you a handsome payout must be a generational thing, and one that probably died off a generation ago. Aside from my unusual love of mass transit history, the reason I have a half-operable 30’ bus parked in my small yard is, I wanted to learn more technical skills. I don’t need them for my job, and I’m really uninterested in learning on a modern car. I think that is a great reason for a teenager or young adult to get a restoration project. You can learn great life and career skills, whether it’s one Ford Model T or a collection of mainline railroad cars (yes, there are several young folks who fit that unusual description!). When I found my modern daily driver totally unresponsive today, I didn’t worry for a moment. I grabbed my tools from working on the bus, tools I wouldn’t own otherwise, and got to work diagnosing automotive electrical 101. It was just a dome light that got bumped to “on” while unloading, but thanks to just 2 years of very off-and-on wrenching on a vehicle, this whole thing was no sweat. So, this hobby can have a very useful future, and we can help achieve it by dropping the notion that our vehicles require the white glove treatment. Show folks what they can learn, how it matters, and how much fun you have along the way.

That’s certainly true, but the C-37M model was still an outlier among outliers. The engine option it has isn’t listed in the Brill C-31 spec booklet, although exceptions seemed to be the rule at ACF-Brill. Pittsburgh Railways got the same bigger engine in their even smaller 27-foot buses. Also, the enlarged Evans heat/ventilation setup was unique to the Army coaches. ACF-Brill thought the unique buses they delivered to the Army might catch on with civilians, so they introduced a revised version right after C-37M production ended: the model SU-37. Sadly, they only built 15 of this new “SU”burban model. My bus is getting covered back up for a while, so I won’t have many more updates. I have a lot of small parts like wipers and marker lights to fix. Once the restoration really gets moving again, would anyone object to a separate restoration thread for my bus in this forum? I find my coach is out of place in most bus forums, since 99% of the content there tends to be heavily modded diesel-powered motorhomes. I like that folks here care about carburetors, preservation, and restoring all the little details to original condition!

Mine is an interesting hybrid: a suburban coach built on a city transit body, all a special order for the US Army. They started with ACF-Brill’s rather lightweight C-31 city bus and specified a larger engine, a spare tire compartment, luggage racks, and more comfortable coach seats. I only knew she was built by Brill when I got her, everything else I figured out as I worked on the bus. If you want some more details, this is the historical sign I keep with the bus:

Got more of the lights rust treated and reinstalled, and temporarily put some nice shiny chrome and enamel on her nose. Lots of work remains, but it’s nice to stand back and stare at a dream steadily coming true!

I’m working on restoring the 11 light fixtures for the front of my ‘51 Brill coach. Today I installed the parking lights, and what a journey that was! - Just studying old photos to find what parking lights would be accurate took a while. I finally found a fixture that looks close on eBay, then had to find a clear lens to fit it. Had to flatten part of the bezel to fit the lens, and cut my own gaskets, but it worked! - The round holes were just a bit too small for the more accurate fixture I switched to. To cut the aluminum body, I clamped a reciprocating saw blade in a vice and hammered it until it was curved. Worked pretty well! - I couldn’t solder the wires with my pencil iron, so I cut an aluminum can as a heat shield, and torch soldered both connections. Hard work, but they’re very solid now. So here’s the results: two nice 1950s clear glass parking lights where there used to be ugly 1990s amber plastic lights. I need to finish other lights before I reinstall the battery and test everything.

I just received the LEDs to convert everything in my vehicle, except the turn signals. Of course, being a 30’ bus, it’s a lot of bulbs to change! I spent several nights just figuring out what to get, so I hope some of what I learned comes in handy for someone. There’s a lot of LED bulbs on the market right now, which is both good and bad. It was hard to narrow down what to get, but on the bright side, there’s enough variety of light color and design that I can make everything look mostly like it has the original bulbs. Some just have a frosted globe, but some even have a clever filament-shaped LED inside a glass-like globe. I narrowed my searches by the bulb socket type to eliminate 90% of the irrelevant results. In my case, BA9s and BA15s were the sockets, meaning bayonet base, 9 or 15 mm, and Single contact. Then I looked up the approximate light output of the traditional bulbs in lumens, and looked for comparable LEDs. I couldn’t find one source for all of them, but just Googling the GE bulb number got me specs for each. Watt ratings are so different between LED and incandescent that they’re useless for comparison. I needed 3 different brightnesses of BA15s bulb, corresponding to GE bulb numbers 67, 93, and 1141, so finding different lumens will help keep things looking original. I’ll be sure to post the results once I have the bus running with the new bulbs installed. If they burn cooler, last longer, and slightly reduce fire risk, I’ll be very happy!

What kind of horn is it? I fixed a Sparton 12v “snail” horn by turning the adjusting nut and testing it straight off a battery. I’ve seen similar 6v horns from Sparton, so here’s hoping it’s similar. I made a video on the horn restoration for a bus project YouTube channel that I never finished or made public. Here’s the link so you can see the horn repair video. The first 5 minutes or so are what should be relevant to your question. Hope that helps! -Steven

I put together a pair of front parking lights tonight. I got a pair of complete NOS red light fixtures and separate clear lenses, not knowing for sure if they would fit. With a slightly thicker home-cut gasket, and just a little gentle hammering to straighten out one curve on the bezels, the new lenses fit perfectly! So once the front end paint job is complete, every light on the front of my bus will be new except the turn signals. What I started with: One done, one in pieces: A successful test!

Not sure whether I made his day, but it sure sounded like it at the time! So, my bus lives under an RV cover, and with the lousy weather lately, she hasn’t been uncovered much. I had the cover rolled back and was working on her this weekend, when I heard a VERY excited young voice on the sidewalk: ”A BUS! A BUS! There’s a BUS under there!” Apparently some little boy walking by with his parents had been really, really curious what was hiding under the big piece of canvas next to my driveway! It certainly made me smile, and I hope it brightened that family’s day.

Mine is the pre-WWII intercity bus from the same builder as my project. Art Deco and air conditioned, can’t ask much more than that! I don’t know of any of these model 37P series coaches surviving among the few places that bother to preserve buses.

In my vintage bus project, I have one story of one that got away, and a larger problem of how the entire bus restoring world has a larger problem: the junkyards that once held plenty of bus parts are almost completely gone. When I first looked for a personal project vehicle, (and gave up on the pipe dream of a trolley car,) I had to save up first. While the project fund was still tiny, this 1930s Ford came up for sale for only a few thousand. I wanted it, but couldn’t afford it. I was lucky that a few years later, the Brill bus I ended up buying was not only more historically interesting, but priced lower (and in better condition!). But I sure wouldn’t mind having a nice little pre-WWII transit bus like this one. But finding parts is proving to be a heck of a challenge. Even in the 1990s, a couple junkyards in my state had plenty of parts buses of all sorts, but within a decade or so, they were all gone. I’m sure some automobile parts are total unobtainium also, but spare a thought for the handful of folks who think an antique bus deserves to have its complete original interior. It’s proving to be a heck of a quest so far!

Hagerty has been fantastic for me. J.C. Taylor would not touch insuring a bus registered as an antique, no matter what I did. But Hagerty made no issue of it. Now the old bus is well insured for far less cost than I expected. And everyone I’ve ever talked with, phone or at a Hershey meet, has been knowledgeable, helpful, friendly, and just the right level of interested in my restoration project.