Tag Archives: master bed

bunk bed, design, school bus RV, Skoolie, woodwork

Changing designs (for the master bed) (Part II)

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So I set about designing benches whose backs would be able to be lifted away from the bench, turned and rotated so that they would each become half of the bed across the gap between the two benches.  Each of the benches will be 24″ wide (from the wall) and 58-59″ long (I’ll figure this out more exactly when I empty out the back of the bus and get to the actual building), with a height of 20″.

The overall design of the platform sections.
The overall design of the platform sections.

This would leave a space of roughly 58″ by 42″ that would need to be filled in to make a flat bed surface between the benches. A single platform that big would be very hard to hide away, so I set up the design to make this into two parts (one for the back of each bench seat), each roughly 29″ by 43 1/2″.  The extra 1 1/2″ for this length is for an overlap with the bench of 3/4″ on either side.

The paneled bench front with notches to fit the platforms.
The paneled bench front with notches to fit the platforms.

In order to make these really stable, I designed each of the sections to have three 1 1/2″ x 1 1/2″ supports that would rest in notches in the benches. The tops of the benches and the platforms is going to be 3/4″ oak faced plywood (and the panels in the bench will be 1/4″ plywood).

The bench in profile, showing the `pocket` for the platform.
The bench in profile, showing the `pocket` for the platform.

Given that the windows start at 29″ from the floor and the bench seat would be at 20″, making these 29″ wide platforms into the back of the bench posed a small problem, since we wanted to keep as much of our window view as possible.  Toward this end, I decided to cover not more than 6″ of the window with the bench seat (which would be about the same height as the back of the sideways seat in the cabin area), which necessitated deep pockets in the back of the bench.

The top-view of the bench.
The top-view of the bench.

This would still allow for the area in front of the pocket to be used for storage.  In order to access this, I worked out a hinged panel in the seat top that could still be opened when the bed platforms were in place. In arranging this in the design, it occurred to me that the ‘pocket’ where the platform would rest while it was a bench would be a big empty area when it was made into a bed, so the design needed another hinged panel that would fold down and close when the platform was in place to be a bed.

The side and fronts of the bench would be the same oak paneling that I’ve put up for the wall between the bathroom and galley area. knowing that, I came out with a whole materials list and cutting diagrams.  I’ll post the building of this when I get there, but this seems the best way to compromise our wants and our needs.

The materials list for the benches.
The materials list for the benches.

 

The cutting diagrams for the plywood.
The cutting diagrams for the plywood.
design, woodwork

Changing designs (for the master bed) (Part I)

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In designing the bus, we worked with a couple of options for what we would do for the master bed in the aft of the bus.

We had debated the pros and cons of a solid bed, a murphy-style bed, and of folding benches of a number of different styles. It was already a given that we wanted as much window as possible, so the build-in bed and the folding benches would work, but the murphy-style really wouldn’t, unless we wanted to lose all the overhead storage area and set it against the bunk wall, but even then, we’d end up with a small, short, bunk-style bed and/or limited access to the back door with an auxiliary bench to make the bed bigger when folded down. The solid bed was out, since we both decided that we wanted to keep the rear exit door fully accessible (since it is the widest access point on the bus).

So the viable option for us was the folding bench seats on either side of the bedroom, but then it got into designing how the benches would fold out and still be stable. Someone’s build thread on the skoolie board had a really cool metal couch whose back would pivot on four attached arms and become a stable bed element. However, I wasn’t able to find it later (because there are TONS of them), and I couldn’t work up a model I liked using wood as the arms.

My first working design was to have a bench where the back would be on two arms (at each end) that would slide down into a channel in the bench while being a bench, but then lift and pivot (on a stop-pin and brace assembly) to fold down and over the bench to become part of the bed platform. However, I still wasn’t satisfied with the way it was going to work. I thought that the middle area of the bed where the two extended bench-backs came together was likely to be wobbly, which meant that I’d need to have support legs that either folded down and locked together (which could be a pain, especially in the back by the rear door where it might be really difficult to reach on a dark, rainy night when one wouldn’t want to open up that back door), or perhaps slid out from the bench, which seemed potentially awkward to maneuver around while lifting and sliding the bench backs into place. But this was the best I’d come up with so far, so I figured on working the details out later.

I got some new inspiration from Tiny Homes on the Move which isn’t so much a demonstration of HOW to fit out a vehicle as a tiny home, but rather a glossy, picture-filled, look-at-the-neat-stuff-other-folks-have-done sort of book, where each wheeled or water vehicle covered gets a one or two-page spread. I’d been going through the book slowly, looking over the projects when I hit one where a pick-up truck camper had been refitted and there were two pictures of the guy who did it reading at a little table between two benches, and then laying down on a bed above the table and benches that extended out over the cab.

This gave me the idea for a way to make a stable, removable bed that would be stored as benches that would leave the back area of the bus available as an ‘observation area’ with 270 degree windows, and access to the back door.

(To be continued in Part II)

164-50, Appliance, bunk bed, design, Electrics, RV oven, RV stove, School Bus, school bus RV, Skoolie, woodwork

Design time …

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In order to get to doing anything with a bus that isn’t being a bus, you have to remove the seats.  And this is critical not just for floor-plan stuff, but for insurance and registration, unless you’re a commercial business and you don’t mind paying the rates for commercial insurance (Yikes!).  Now, you remember all those seats, right?

Oh, wait, that’s them …

Now, the seats are in with 5/16″ bolts of varying lengths through the floor and then 9/16″ bolts into the seat-rail along the edge of the wall, and, had one a team of people, and if the bolts weren’t very rusty, one could use a ratchet and/or a couple of wrenches and remove the bolts, and then the seats, and all would be wonderful.

But I live in the real world, and the bus was used by the Whitesboro High School (near Syracuse) and being that Syracuse was known as the ‘Salt City’ (due to the salt from the evaporation of shallow seas that covered the area in the Devonian), the bottom of the bus was covered in a light layer of salt, and the bolts were heavily corroded.

Here was the introduction of power-tools to the game.  First, I had a Makita impact hammer with a chisel blade that does wonderfully on concrete, but did basically nothing the the rusted-on bolts.  I had hoped to use it as the force is a shearing force, and would leave the flanges of the bus feet intact.  I ended up using a Makita 4″ angle grinder to take off the heads of the bolts.  A tip that I got from the Skoolie board stated that an easy way to deal with bolt heads was to cut down vertically through them and then horizontally slice to the cut.  It worked nicely, produced a whole lot of smoke, sparks, and burned rubber smell (more on that later), and the seats came out really nicely. When I had the seats all loose from the floor, I picked out three that were the ones I was planning on keeping for re-installation.

Once a bus has the seats out, it’s a big empty space.

“This is really funky, it’s kinda like one big empty room, yeah!“
  But it really is true, there is a lot of space.  And it gets loud with the echos.  But you can really see the blank canvas with all the seats removed.
No, really … It’s a lot of space … for a vehicle.

In fact, disregarding the wheelwells over the back, you can imagine it as basically a big rectangle 90″ wide, 26′ 8″ long (to the back of the driver’s chair), and just over 6′ high.  That’s around 200 square feet of floor space.  The wrinkles, of course are the wheelwells, roof hatches, and the exit doors.  Now, many people close up the side emergency doors (if their bus has one), but we wanted to keep ours, so we had to design around it.

There were some design constraints and advice that I gleaned from other Skoolie builds, things like you don’t really want to put your bathroom (and grey and black water tanks) behind the rear axle, due to the bouncing.  Propane tanks should go ahead of the rear axle, due to safety factors in collisions.  Re-using  the frames of the existing bus seats gives DOT rated safety harness points.  There was one seat we removed (just by the side emergency exit door) that had four feet, while all the others had two feet on one side, and were meant to attach the other side to the seat-rail.

So we ended up with these preliminary plans:

With a fold-out master bed and an added rear observation deck.
With a fixed master bed on the port side …
  Our designs went back and forth over those factors and our space, doorway, hatch, and undercarriage limitations and we ended up with this as our final plan:
The annotated final design. (New emergency exit window locations in red)
  This new design makes the shower a ‘walk-through’ to get to the side door, and doesn’t indicate the angling of upper areas of the walls (in green) to leave the roof hatches.  The two seats facing each other behind the driver are connected to the side chair rail, while the one that runs along the starboard wall is the one that had four feet.  It allows for a 24″ hallway from front to back and for full measure twin-bed bunks, rather than the extra slim/short RV bunks.
  Now, this isn’t perfect, but it set up the base of what we wanted.  It doesn’t show the locations of any of the water/propane/air tanks, and the fridge size is a bit smaller than what we actually got because of the extra tubing/heat vents on the back.  But it gives an idea of what we’re aiming for in the finished product.