The 57-year-old Half Moon Bay mechanic has finished his dream machine — a 19-ton retired 1971 passenger bus — the type used by Greyhound or Coach to get people cross-country on the cheap.
That might not sound like anyone’s dream vehicle, and Eck wasn’t that excited about it when he first picked it up last year. Spotting it for sale on Craigslist, Eck purchased the old bus from a widow near Las Vegas for $15,000.
  
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“It was a real mess,” Eck said. “When you get a half-million miles on a bus, the engine, the brakes, the transmission, everything has to be replaced.”
But the vehicle, specifically a Silver Eagle model coach, had one thing going for it. The old owner had been laboriously gutting the old bus to make it into an RV. The owner had stripped the interior and replaced the engine. He even raised the ceiling of the bus by a whole foot, so that people didn’t have to duck their heads while maneuvering inside.
But the old owner died when his renovation of the bus was only half done.
So when Eck purchased it, he wanted to pick up that job and outfit the bus to be the ultimate road-trip machine, a mini-house on wheels.
Now, more than a year and hundreds of hours of grunt work later, the dream is complete.
Eck sat down on the plush gray sofa in the spacious inside of his bus, triangulated between the vehicle’s wide-screen TV and a fireplace (with its own exhaust pipe). A smirk of pride on his face, he explained that the bus was his magnum opus as a mechanic. And as a gear-head for more than 40 years, he had plenty of tricks to put into this project.
“I’ve been through every inch of this bus,” he said. “All the best ideas from every RV I’ve seen over the years were put into this.”
His RV would rival most homes for comfort. Solar panels and a satellite dish dot the roof. A studio-sized bedroom with a queen-size bed takes up the caboose of the bus. Just to the front of that is a full bathroom with a toilet, mirror, sink, shower and the space to actually maneuver. Next in line is a kitchen with a large metal fridge, three-burner stove and enough counter space to conceivably cook while traveling. The next section features a living-room area with hardwood floors and sofa seating for eight with trays that fold out in front of the seats.
And finally, at the very front is the driver’s chair and steering wheel, the only feature of the old bus left completely intact.
“I think I’d rather be in this than my house!” he said. “How it drives, it’s such a pleasure. It’s like a cozy Cadillac or a limousine.”
The real finesse is in the guts of the machine. Already a diesel-engine vehicle, Eck outfitted it to run off vegetable oil, which he procures in large amounts from local eateries. About 400 gallons of vegetable oil are stored in the old luggage compartments underneath the bus. That quantity of fuel would be a necessity on a long trip because the bus only gets about four miles to the gallon. Sharing the luggage space with the veggie-oil tanks is an old tractor engine used to power the electronics when the solar panels can’t. Across from that is a large propane tank for the stove, heating and hot water.
With a twinge of a survivalist’s instincts, Eck said he prepared his RV to be ready to go if an earthquake, tsunami or nuclear strike hit the Coastside. He stocks extra food, water and fuel in the bus at all times, and he built in CB and ham radio systems. He even avoided any computerized parts so that the fallout of a nuclear catastrophe wouldn’t short out his engine during an escape.
“If there’s nuclear fallout, any computerized car won’t work,” he said incredulously. “Within an hour, I’d be ready to go … but everyone else’s car will just shut down!”
Eck and his wife, Ginny, plan to use their homemade RV for the usual road trips to different corners of the continent. The couple recently returned from a trek down to Pismo Beach for Memorial Day weekend, and they’re already planning sojourns to Canada, Chicago and other destinations.
The Ecks, longtime owners of Half Moon Bay Auto Repair, plan to slowly hand over the reins to their children, so they can go out and play in their new wheels.
“It’s our dream to let the kids take over the business, so we can go on more trips,” Ginny Eck said. “That’ll take maybe a year.”
Her husband says he’s totally confident behind the wheel of the 12-gear, 12-foot-3-inch-high juggernaut. The weight and height of the vehicle could prohibit it from driving on many roads. It just barely squeezes under low bridges, which under standard engineering give the roof of the bus about two inches of space. You can hear the antennae scratching the bridge, Eck said.
But despite all the work to build a perfect home on wheels, David Eck said he still isn’t sure about living perpetually on the road.
“If I had to, I could. But I don’t think I could do it permanently,” he summarized. “I still want a place to call home.”
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