04:41pagsikat 05:22
The rooster starts up at half four. You carry your coffee out to the unit you are still paying for, find one spot of dust on a panel you polished last night, wipe it off, and stand there a minute and a half looking at it before the shift.
We build the thing that is worth doing that to. Twenty-two of us, on the highway at Sindalan, since 1978.
22 katao9–14 katawan a year
A chassis comes in with an engine, a cab floor and nothing else. Everything above the frame rail we make: ribs bent over the hulma, the wooden buck standing on the floor since Boyet Dizon cut it in 1981, then stainless beaten over the ribs a panel at a time with a hammer and a sandbag. Hulma — a form, a mould.
Before any of it, the whole side is chalked full size on the concrete. You can stand on your own jeepney five months before it exists. Most people do.
The floor argues in Kapampangan and the sheet is written in Tagalog, because that is the language a franchise application is in. Both are on this page, in that order.
We turn work away, but never on what you earn. Nine to fourteen bodies a year is what twenty-two men can do properly, so the question we ask is whether you actually want something.
Come with a picture in your head and we will build that. If you want the same body as everybody else on your route, there are three shops in Guagua who will do it faster and cheaper than us, and we will tell you which ones.
We will not pretend the rules are what they used to be. A new traditional body on a surplus engine cannot be plated as a new franchise, and has not been able to for years now.
So we ask about the paper before the picture. Most of what leaves this gate is a rebody for a unit that already holds a line, for a cooperative that consolidated and kept its route. The rest goes to provincial, private and resort work outside the franchise net entirely.
Tell us your plate, your cooperative and your route, and we will tell you on the phone whether the jeepney you want can be registered. If it cannot, you will have lost the price of a call and nothing else.
Every price on this site is the real price, and the sheet below adds itself up while you change your mind. A whole body runs ₱698,800 to ₱1,551,400 depending mostly on how many people you seat.
Thirty per cent to enter the queue, the rest sa hulugan over 24, 36 or 48 months, with no interest on any of it. A unit on a provincial route brings in roughly ₱700 to ₱1,100 boundary a day, so do the arithmetic against the monthly figure on the sheet before you sign anything — and if it does not work on one unit, say so and we will tell you what does. We take your old body against the price. Nobody here will ask what you do for a living before quoting you. Hulugan — paying by instalment.
1,2 mmstainless, 304
We chalk this out full size on the floor before a panel is cut, and this is that drawing. Change anything and it changes with you. When it looks like your jeepney, send it. It is the same sheet whether you are buying a whole body or one chrome horse.
₱2,400to ₱52,000, fitted
None of this is decoration in the sense of being optional. A jeepney that nobody picks out of a line of six at a corner in the dark does not earn. Every fitting here is doing that job, and every one of them can be bought on its own for a unit you already run.
29 taonsa brotsa
There is no vinyl in this shop. Everything written on a Banaag body is enamel, laid by one man with a sable brush and a stick to steady his wrist, and it is the last thing that happens before a body is brought out.
He works in four hands, and he will tell you which one your route wants: blok for a long name that has to stay readable at forty metres, bilog when the board is short and the name is not, eskrito for a dedication meant to be read slowly, and sombra — block with a dropped shadow and a chrome outline — when somebody wants their mother's name on the side of a vehicle to be the first thing you see from across the highway.
A route board set is ₱14,000 — the front and both sides. A dedication is included, and so is a saint; Nolan has never once written one down on the sheet.
1904unang Ligligan Parul
San Fernando has run the giant lantern festival since 1908. The lanterns are five metres across and carry thousands of bulbs, and what makes the light run around them is not a circuit board. It is a rotor: a wooden drum wrapped in cut foil contacts that a wireman files by hand, one strip at a time, until the pattern in the lantern matches the pattern he has in his head.
Then the wireman lays a strip of tape on the barrel, and wherever the tape is, the hairpin lifts off the steel and the bulb goes dark. So the pattern is never written. It is cut as silence — he tapes the light away until what is left is what he heard in his head.
That is the same trade as a light valance, done by the same families, in the other half of the year. Boyet Dizon wired parol before he ever welded a rib. It is why the electrician is the most senior man on this floor after the panel beater, and why we will cut you a rotor for your jeepney if you want your tubes to do more than sit there.
₱42,000, and it takes him eleven days.
Ten hairpins off a four-hundred-hairpin barrel. The dark cells are where the tape is.
521katawan since 1978
What has left the gate, and who it went to. Tap a line and the sheet above goes back to that specification. It is the fastest way to start from something that already works on a route like yours.
