The load wasn’t light — it was the front end of an old bus, after all — and it was getting heavier while Lonny Taylor and Tay Whiteside held it.

The crew members from Black Dog Salvage were waiting on the Market Street sidewalk Thursday morning to haul it into the new home of Jack Brown’s Beer and Burger Joint, where it would be mounted on the wall behind the door. What was the hold up?

At last, Clark McCarthy-Miller emerged from the restaurant and told them to put it down for a minute. The cameraman wasn’t quite ready.

Such is the reality of filming a reality TV show. Black Dog Salvage has been the subject of an HGTV show called “Salvage Dawgs” since last year, and its owners and staff have learned that sometimes the TV part trumps the reality part.

McCarthy-Miller, a producer with Trailblazer Studios, which produces “Salvage Dawgs,” said his crew was in town to film other activities at the shop and decided to film the bus front installation, too, while they were here. He couldn’t say when — or even if — the scenes filmed Thursday would be used on the show.

Episode three featured Black Dog co-owner Mike Whiteside discovering the rusty and paint-spotted front of the 1946 Ford bus in a salvage yard near Moneta.

“Our intention was to turn it into a bar,” Whiteside said.

But when Aaron Ludwig, one of the owners of Jack Brown’s, saw it in the shop at Black Dog, he wanted it for himself. Whiteside resisted, and Ludwig asked if they could just do the project for the restaurant, which is in the spot long occupied by Ernie’s.

“It was perfect,” Whiteside said.

Whiteside and his crew mounted the bus front on a panel, rigged one headlight and one turn signal to work, and bored four holes in the bumper for Ludwig to mount draft beer taps.

Whiteside and Ludwig had a discussion about where Ludwig wanted the thing mounted.

And then, at McCarthy-Mills’ direction, everybody left and walked back in to have the whole discussion again with the camera rolling.

Once the bus front was inside the bar, the one camera recorded the effort to test mount the bus front on the wall, during which the crew realized it had to insert a shim on one side of it to keep it from hitting a light switch.

On the second effort, they taped off the light switch to keep it out of the way.

But Mike Whiteside told his son, Tay, to put the shim in on the second try even though it wasn’t needed so they preserved the continuity of the filming of the second try with the first.

“There you go, Mike!” McCarthy-Mills said.

Even with the camera rolling, the banter was real enough.

“This is going to look cool with beer bottles and cans stacked on top of it,” Ludwig said as the bus front settled into place and was leveled.

“What doesn’t?” asked Ted Ayers, a member of the Black Dog installation crew.

Once up, everyone stood back and admired it.

About that time, other owner of Black Dog, Robert Kulp, walked in.

“Look who showed up just when the work’s done,” Mike Whiteside said. “He was hoping the beer taps were going to be ready.”

Ludwig said he hopes to have the restaurant — his fourth, and his second Jack Brown’s location — open by late March or early April. He’s fond of using Black Dog Salvage for decor in all of his restaurants, he said.

Besides the bus front, the Black Dog Crew also installed on the front of the bar a set of rusty corrugated metal panels that had been the skin on a 100-year-old farm building.

The bar top is made from two-foot wide sections of green ash from a tree that had been cut down on the campus at Virginia Tech to clear a nature trail.

Mike Whiteside was pleased to see the bus front find a home.

“We like to see the product going to its final destination,” he said.

A few minutes later, Whiteside was back on camera being interviewed.

“We’re done here,” he announced.

For now, anyway. A few minutes later, the bus front was being hauled back out the front door and onto the Black Dog truck to be returned to the shop for more work.

Sometimes the TV part trumps the reality part.

Weather Journal

13 hours ago