Sleeping Platform Part 3

The saga continues! Catch up on pt 1 here and pt 2 here.

After one and a half weekends-worth of prepping, measuring and cutting, it was good this weekend to finally start putting the sleeping platform together. First task of the day, though, was to cut a couple of access holes for storage spaces that will only be accessible from the top. In several people’s designs on the ‘net, they add fancy hinged doors or removable panels but I’ve just left the holes open assuming our mattress won’t sink into them. I also cut a couple of slots into the top platform that we’ll use for the drawers to lock into.

From there it was time for the moment of truth…. except that the moment of truth turned into several hours of truth. Because all the different parts of the contraption are variously interlinked, it turned out to be a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to make sure each bit went into the car in the right order and got stashed in the right place whilst another bit was getting assembled. With enough room left for me!

Eventually, I got the whole lot screwed together and the good news is that it feels rock solid.

However, it wasn’t all sweetness and light as it turns out there’s one minor design disaster in my masterplan. From inside the car, it’s not possible to open either of the rear doors or operate the windows! What a complete muppet I am. For long term use, I think this will be pretty irritating, so I’ll need to give a bit of thought to a decent solution – most likely cutting a hole of some sort in the top platform.

On the next day I started on the drawers and got stuck into cutting up my remaining sheets of ply into the right sized pieces. As always, nothing is ever simple (or maybe it’s just that I don’t plan carefully enough?!) and the length of the drawers meant I had to cut my sheets really inefficiently which in turn meant I could only cut enough components for one and a half drawers using the wood I had to hand. Damn those small sheets of Japanese plywood!

After an hour’s-worth of slot cutting I had something resembling a drawer!

Because the length of the drawers exceeded the longest length of drawer runner you can buy, I adapted stole an idea I’d seen on the ‘net and used skateboard bearings to form the drawers runners – the skate bearing idea also works out much, much lighter. My scheme works the opposite way around to the one I copied as I mounted my bearings to the sides of the drawers. The bearings then run along a piece plywood screwed to the side of the carcass. Having been a skateboarder on-and-off for getting on 30 years, it’s nice to know there’s a bit of skate-tech in the car making itself useful.

At this point it was time for the weekend’s second moment of truth – this time it really was going to be a moment as the drawers were either going to be the right size. Or they weren’t. We all like a happy ending and this time around I was rewarded with one. The drawers fit the holes exactly as planned and the drawer runner idea seems to work reasonably well. Happy bunnies all round!

Still lots of odd jobs and things to think about though:

• make the other drawer
• handles for the drawers
• locks for the drawers
• possibly something to stop the drawers from bouncing around

For the time being, though, everything seems to have come together pretty well.

Whilst the last 3 weekends of woodworking have been fun, it has meant that we haven’t been out on the open road testing the car – as it’s a new car to us we want things to break whilst we’re close to home rather than out on the open road so were always set on doing as much driving as we could before leaving. So, now that the sleeping situation is functional, for the next few weekends we’re going to hit the road, which means we’ll also be able to see how the platform works out in ‘real-life’….

Part 4 can be found here….