[Archived]

Based on what I know, Jon is correct when he says: “Vantare was started in the early 90’s by Mike Guth. It was sold to Featherlite, who also purchased a little later Vogue which at the time was owned by Harvey Mitchell (former owner of Parliament).”

I don’t recall the year (mid to late 90’s), the late Charlie Raymond and I were in the motorcoach lot at the Indianapolis Motorsport Speedway during the Brickyard 400 weekend looking at two Vantare show coaches when Mike Guth walked up to Charlie and they started talking. They were acquainted from Prevost rallies. Mike then introduced us to Conrad Clements (the founder and CEO of Featherlite trailer of Cresco, Iowa) as the new, proud owner of Vantare.

By this time Clements had taken Featherlite public. If you can find the article via Google, there was some interesting discussion between the SEC, Featherlite, Clements, and another separate company that Clements controlled over the sale of finished Prevost Featherlite/Vantare coaches (built by the public company) to a separate private company controlled by members of the public company’s management which the private company then turned around and leased to end users. Interest chain of events.

Early Vantare’s should be all Mike Guth and then after the sale of Featherlite the Vantare will have the Featherlite influence. Someone else might know the exact dates a little better than do.

For what its worth, my friend Charlie (who had four or five new Liberty coaches) spoke highly of Mike Guth and as I recall thought he built a good coach. His problem with Vantare was location. Vantare’s plant in Florida was too far from his home in La Crosse, WI. His solution to a problem with the coach was to jump in, drive 4.5 hours, pull up in front of Liberty in North Chicago, and tell Frank, Frank, and Bill to “fix it”.

[Peter]

For anyone looking in the older coach price range, especially XL coaches keep in mind there are a considerable number of coaches from converters who are no longer in business, but the coaches still have some degree of support. The key is to define your tolerance for limited support, and before you buy, do your homework because some conversions are underpriced compared to their value, but some while seemingly underpriced have low value because some components and systems are prorietary and there is limited availability or support. The low price compensates for the potential grief.

One coach that was a simple low priced coach from the start was Royale, I am not aware of many (if any H3 Royales) but they made a good honest coach. The systems were good, their interiors were mostly wood and looked nice, and even if they had no support (they do have some support) they would be worth considering because the design simplicity makes them very serviceable.

[Tommy]

One of the reasons we went with the Angola (even knowing they were basically out of business) was that it was a more basic conversion .. the theory was more basic == less hassle and breakage. This seems to be olding true as what few repairs we’ve had to do have been more or less simple things and just taken a little time and sometimes knowledge.. Yeah she doesn’t have slides, doesn’t have fancy controls for anything but an average of 20k driving a year and only a few normal wear and tear breakage points in the house speaks volumes.

On the other hand, my battles with air-leaks continue .. but thats not really a converter issue but a bus-age issue