I contacted Wausau and they told me to wait until the time ran out on the rehabs they had done 6 years earlier. Finally, they called me and I purchased the last one for $1000. All the rest went to scrap.
I drove the bus back to California and it had terrible radius rods so was hard to steer. I fixed this with all new bushings on the rear and never had much trouble with the bus afterwards.
This bus was unique. They never made a maintenance manual for these that was correct. Because this bus was the only fishbowl equipped with a V-730, the wiring was different. Of course, all the Canadian fishbowls began using V-730s, but this the only US-built one. there was a bit of controversy over V-730s being installed on US New Looks. Because of the anti-trust lawsuit against GM, they refused to put these transmissions in American-built fishbowls. AM General and Flxible were using them in 1976. GM was offered
a 600-bus order from New Jersey Transit but they had to be equipped with V-730s. GM refused, and the order went to Flxible. The story goes that GM stopped building the VH and VS transmissions and because this was a delayed order for 11 4523s for Wausau, they simply ran out of transmissions and so these last 11 buses were equipped with V-730s. This infuriated American bus operators who requested the V-730 when AM General and Flxible were using them.
When and Where did it go?
Fun Fleet bus #141 was sold to a private party. More on that later.