My wife and I like to take road trips, and we like to camp, both at our destination, and along the way there and back. This is all well and good, but sometimes you get tired before you get to the night's stop. Other times its pouring rain out and pitching a tent doesn't sound like the greatest idea in the world. For years, we've dealt with these problems by pressing on to the next available hotel. This solution is expensive and has no redeeming entertainment value. (Your mileage may vary, but we pretty much dislike hotels of every stripe.)
In 2001, it became time to replace my 1982 Honda Accord (with 192,000 miles on it). The car still ran like a top, but was developing some random electrical problems - such as the power window on the passenger side no longer going down. We decided to hunt for a new vehicle.
We immediately dismissed the idea of purchasing an RV. Our experience with RV campers has involved people coming out into the woods, parking their Nimitz-sized RV, starting a noisy and smelly generator, and filling the woods with the sounds of television and other annoyances. Granted, not all RV'ers are like this - in fact, most are not - but we didn't really want to give the appearance of being aligned with this sort of "camping" experience. Also, we wanted to take our vehicle many places an RV could not go - such as Going-To-The-Sun Road in Glacier National Park - and to use it in our day-to-day transportation.
Honda's gigantic Odyssey minivan seemed like the ticket. We bought one in Ohio in August, 2001 and drove it across country to where we live in Arizona. During the whole trip we reflected on the fact that the only thing the van lacked was sleeping quarters. So in June, 2002, I installed an air conditioner into my garage/shop, and, with considerable conceptual and design help from Michael Bakich (who has actually done this before), I got to work on a sleeping platform.
Glen Sanner gave us some leftover 2x4 from his observatory building project. We used them for the frame of the sleeping platform. The 2x4 were very high quality - straight and with nice edges all around. What a guy!
Tim Doyle suggested notching the 2x4 so as to nest them together. Above are the first three frame members put together and test-fitted on the floor of the van.
In several of the photos here, you will notice circular artifacts. This is caused by internal reflections in the lens of our Nikon Coolpix 775 digital camera.
All the frame members are now cut to their approximate size and notched to accomodate each other. This method of joinery is extremely strong, and quite rigid. The parallel members stay parallel and the perpendicular ones stay perpendicular, even under a considerable amount of force.
The notches were done on a table saw.
In this picture you can see the middle-seat hold-down bars, set into the floor of the van. Some of them are long because the middle seats are in a bucket or captain's-chair configuration, but can be slid together to make for a bench seat configuration, along with easier access to the rear seat. These seat hold-downs will be used to secure the bed onto the floor of the van, making it safer in an accident than if we had left it unsecured. In addition, the rear seat hold-down, visible as a black U-bracket on the side of the van a few inches above the floor, will also be used to secure the bed.
In this picture, the rear seat is folded down into the floor of the van, out of view.
A view of the frame from the rear of the van. The closest cross-member to the camera is directly over the seam between the van floor and the folded-down rear seat. From this angle, you can easily get a sense that the bed will be tapered. At the head of the bed, near the driver and passenger seats at the front of the van, the width of the bed is some 63". At the foot, it is about 49".
Yours truly, happy that everything fits so far. As each piece of the frame was constructed, it was 'dry-fit' together inside the van to see if the dimensions were right.
The frame having been completed, legs were needed to hold the bed platform above the floor of the van. In this view, you can see the middle and rear legs. The middle legs are the critical ones - they are braced in each direction in an attempt to keep the bed from wobbling. (The clamps are temporary.) The rear legs are braced only in the fore-aft direction, to keep the bed from rocking forward and backward in the van. This is important while sleeping on the bed, and also while driving - you don't want things creaking and banging back there while you are trying to concentrate on traffic.
A view from the rear of the van. This shows the construction of the left-right braces for the middle legs quite nicely. They are made of 3/4" pine. The braces are screwed and glued to the leg itself, but attach to the frame members with bolts and thumbscrews for easy disassembly. The same method was adopted for the rear legs.
Not shown well here, but shown in a later photo, is the front leg design, which was contributed substantially by Tim Doyle.
The height of each leg is different, because the floor of the van is not flat. The floor is 'deepest' just behind the passenger seats, and elevates stepwise a couple inches as the rear of the van is reached. To get the leg length right, we suspended the frame within the van with ropes, and measured and cut the legs.
The height of the frame at the front of the van is over 24". This allows generous access underneath the bed from the dual sliding side doors for storage of luggage and whatnot. At the rear of the van, the clearance is slightly less - about 21" or so.
The amount of storage space available under the van is equivalent to that of the trunks of 5.6 Toyota Camrys. If that's not enough, we can always get a roof carrier for the top of the van to carry more stuff. Personally, I seriously doubt we would ever want to take that much junk on a vacation or camping trip.
One of the biggest challenges in this project was creating a form-fitting matress deck for the inside of the van. In order to get the deck in and out, it had to be made in at least three pieces. Simple shapes were not possible, because the interior of the van tapers toward the rear. Also, the bed had to be a couple inches narrower at the head in order to accomodate the door handles for the side doors.
The piece at the head of the van is a simple rectangle, with the corners at the front cut off in a gentle curve. The middle piece, however, has to taper from 63" to 49", and do so by matching two different curves in the wall of the van. Here I am sacrificing a file folder to the problem, cutting it to match the profile of the van.
And here I'm transferring this curve to the plywood matress deck. Note bald spot and extremely white legs.
Cutting the complex curve with a sabre saw. Note that when one workpiece is a sheet of plywood, and the other is a 2001 Honda Odyssey, the shop can get a bit crowded.
It fits like a glove! There is about 3/4 inch of clearance on each side in the form of a gap between the plywood and the wall. The top surface of the plywood is level with the tops of the cupholders shown in the picture, and with the nearly horizontal surface behind the cupholders. The matress pad will actually extend off the plywood deck and onto these ready-made van surfaces, in order to claim an additional 7" of matress width on each side of the van. And that light gray area on the side of the van above the surface is padded, so you don't need to worry about knocking your knees to death on some hard plastic part. Is that cool or what?
A view from the rear. This shows much better than the previous image the level of the deck relative to the cupholders.
The third and last piece of matress decking is a simple rectangle. Not shown here is a hinged fold-out piece that will fit into the "empty" area at the near left. That seemed the best way to accomodate yet another complex curve, without having to make the deck in four pieces.
The mattress will not sit level relative to the van. The mattress is angled downward 3.8 degrees toward the back of the van. In other words, if you park the van on a perfectly level surface, with each tire inflated to the same pressure, a toy car placed on the bed would roll to the foot of the bed.
The reasons for this are several, and the engineering challenges that this angle presented were interesting. The garage slab is sloped slightly for drainage, so the van was not parked on a level surface during construction. We first inflated all the tires to identical values. Then we measured the angle of the garage floor and adopted that as "level" in the van's frame of reference. We then made the 3.8 degree slope relative to this level. In real life, we'll probably never be parking on a level surface - but our preference is to sleep with our feet lower than our heads, rather than the other way around. With a built-in tilt, the law of averages is on our side. For extreme cases, we can put shims (pieces of scrap carpeting or small pieces of wood, perhaps) underneath the bed's legs to get an acceptable level.
The decking material, by the way, is 15/32 inch C-D plywood. We got the C-D because (a) it was stiffer than the B-C at the same lumberyard, and (b) it looked about equally crappy. Of course we could have gone with A-A baltic birch plywood, which in 1/4" is stiffer (though not stronger, so we still would have ended up around 1/2") than the 15/32" stuff we used - but we would have paid approximately six times the price.
A detail of the passenger-side cupholder area. The cupholders are set into an armrest-type affair built into the side of the van. The mattress pad will extend over the cupholders and over the flat surface, right up to the lighter gray fabric on the van wall.
A detail of the head of the bed, showing the deck cutout for the side door handles. For those wondering how we'll get leverage on the door, worry not - the Odyssey has electric doors. Just grab the handle and twitch it, and the door opens and closes itself.
A view from the front of the van. Here you can see how the mattress pad will taper in three sections from about as wide as a queen bed to its narrower foot. There is also plenty of clearance for visibility out the back and side windows while driving.
The mattress pad, already acquired (from "A Foam and Fabric Place" in Tucson) is a 3" thick piece of closed-cell foam. It will be trimmed to follow the curves of the van sides with a very specialized foam-cutting tool - an electric carving knife.
This is a view of the front legs of the bed, with the passenger seat near the camera to the right. The front legs are angled forward and braced with substantial pieces of pine, again screwed and glued into place. These legs are permanent, not removable, and therefore utilize no bolts.
These legs were angled for two reasons. The obvious one is access to storage underneath the bed. By throwing the legs forward, over one foot of additional space is available at the side sliding door. If they had dropped straight down, a 2x4 would have been just a few inches from the middle of the sliding door opening, and would surely be in the way in the event you wanted to throw a suitcase under there.
The other reason for the taper is again accident safety. The long 2x4 that run the length of the bed are approximately centered behind the driver's and passenger's seats. In a head-on collision, these could be lauched straight into the spines of the people sitting in these seats. By angling the legs downward, and reinforcing them heavily, we help insure that the legs will be caught under the seats in the event of a collision. This, along with the tie-downs mentioned earlier, will help keep the bed on the van floor. It also means that tremendous amounts of energy will be expended breaking up the reinforcers before the long 2x4 can get anywhere near the seats to cause us harm.
In addition, the plywood decking is secured to the frame using bolts, to help insure that no plywood goes airborn in the event of an accident. This too will eat up significant amounts of energy before breaking loose. On the whole, we anticipate the bed will be as safe as possible in a collision, though we hope never to find out for certain.
The center and rear legs are bolted on, to allow easy removal.
The plywood decking is now covered with carpet, which serves as a softer-than-plywood base for the mattress.
Cutting the foam mattress pad with a most advanced tool - an electric carving knife from the kitchen. Cutting the mattress to fit the complex shape of the inside of the van was unexpectedly difficult. I had anticipated taking about an hour with it, but it ended up requiring at least three.
The mattress pad is now fully cut, including detents for the sliding door handles. If the mattress interfered with the handles, the sliding doors would not close.
The rear of the van is now dominated by the mattress pad.
This view shows how the mattress pad is fitted to the curve of the van interior...
...and this view of the same location, with the mattress pulled up and away from the edge, shows how the mattress extends onto the cupholders in order to maximize the usable mattress width.
I sewed up a mattress cover by using two king-sized sheets as fabric stock. It is fitted to the fairly odd shape of the foam, and works out pretty nicely.
Budget:
The total so far is about $225. Compare this figure with a single night in a luxury hotel - we break even if we sleep in the bed one time only. Compared with a budget motel, we'll have to sleep in the bed a whopping four times before it pays for itself free and clear.
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