Eagles International Forum

To amplify what Wayne said, the frame tubes might look good on the outside but their thickness might be considerably reduced on the inside. In fact, I have discovered tubes that were full of water and rust debris. Banging with a hammer or pick might cause depressions or holes that will surprise you. Putting a jack under a main frame member near the engine might result in collapse of the tube or deformation. You really need to have someone with Eagle experience look at it before you put another dollar into it.

To get illustrations of the rear axle we need the serial number of the bus (four digits). I have illustrations of numbers 6101 through 7443. Numbers after 7443 are of the newer style. The clearance at the rear needs to be measured at the frame or at the top of the wheel arch to find out if the height is correct.

I see the serial # on the picture of the ID tag (6940). Here is the diagram in the parts manual and both pages of part numbers. The opening pictures look faint but they can be zoomed in to see numbers clearly.

Thanks for the diagrams as well as the extra info. You folks are being super helpful. I am starting to realize it may have more rust than I thought . That being the case, we only paid $1500 (fully refundable) to a family member who has plenty of room financially to keep that promise. We don't plan on spending even a penny more until we see it. As a positive, my husband is good at finding all the faults in vehicles. He has a keen eye as well as a lot of experience with vehicles that are over 40-50 years old, even if buses are sort of new territory. He also has welding experience and we plan to do the repairs ourself.

We are fully expecting to have to do a lot of work on it. We never expected it to be a an easy or a short project, so I am confident we can address any problems that we find.


If it turns out it's rustier than we thought then we will have to decide if it's too far gone to fix. But once again we plan on patching those problem spots ourselves, so financially it is doable.  If it appears to be beyond repair, which I doubt it is, we will either find somebody who wants to buy it and knows of all of it's many issues or we may leave it on the land where it sits and fix it up as a home. 

It's just really difficult for us to get a read on the bus because all of our family members that have been sending pictures and relaying information are not mechanically or "bus life" inclined and therefore they don't really know what to look for without us asking. Kind of like a giant game of telephone.

I am going to pass on this info and the diagrams to them and hopefully get some more info. And just to reiterate, we really appreciate all of your input and bus wisdom. 

I am posting a reply to this thread so that it comes to the top.  Recent additions to our membership have indicated that we have at least one new member that has an 01.  For some reason, our search engine does not seem to like "01" as a search term, so I thought that I would use this thread to give model 01 owners something to "chew) on.

In a related thread (link) , I listed a link to Paul project page on this forum (link) and his WordPress site (link)

Jim

Thanks!