Van Design #1 – Bed platform/garage

One of the existential quandaries that most people face when designing their soon-to-be homes on wheels is “which way am I gonna sleep?” The typical troika of cargo vans folks opt for when choosing this class of vehicle – Mercedes Sprinter, Ford Transit, and Dodge Promaster – are all 99% the same for the most part, but they do vary in cabin lengths and widths, and this is the driving factor in whether to build a bed system where you’re lying down with your head on one wall, feet at the other, or if you have to opt for a lengthwise bed, usually with your head close to the rear doors.

I’m of the mind that in a van build, the bed is the most important feature. A vandweller will be spending approximately one-third of his or her day in their bed, asleep; and how they sleep will affect the other two-thirds of their day. The ability to get a good night’s sleep is one key to happiness, I feel. So I’m putting a lot of thought into this.

If you’re below a particular height, a sideways bed is no problem whatsoever! And I kind of envy my shorter brethren and sistren vandwellers for having this option available to them. Beyond that, even taller people will still opt for the sideways bed, and simply stretch out diagonally. That’s a solution for some; not for me.

There are options to retain, or add, horizontal space in this area; one can simply opt to not build the walls up as much as elsewhere, simply by foregoing or reducing the insulation material installed, and/or not installing wood cladding or whatever other material covering the walls elsewhere. Those materials typically cost an inch or two on either wall, and with all things van building, space is a very precious commodity that cannot simply be added to.

That said… there is one exception, specific to this topic, and that is flares. There’s one company I’ve become aware of, Flarespace, who produces and sells shells that can be installed onto the back walls of these vans, to add a few inches to a rectangular section of the interior – right in the area where the typical rear bed platform is built.

But, I digress, as I have no intention of going this route. I have… other plans.

As I said earlier, space is a precious thing in vans. Therefore, one does not opt for a lengthwise bed without careful consideration. Using your standard queen bed dimensions – 60″ wide by 80″ long – that’s twenty inches more of cabin length you’re going to be eating up. Considering many people go with memory foam mattresses that can be trimmed, one is not necessarily handcuffed to that eighty-inch dimension; depending on one’s comfort level, a bed platform and mattress could be sized fairly close to one’s own height, leaving a little space at the head and feet. Me, I’m 5′ 11″ – 71 inches. So I could bring that length back a good five, six inches and still be comfortable, I think. (That gives me an idea for an experiment – I think I’ll block off the headboard side of my bed with a barrier that is about that deep, to simulate sleeping on a shorter mattress, and see how well I sleep overnight!)

But again, my plans for a bed platform don’t require such an adjustment in bed length, either.

A few weeks ago, my brain stumbled upon an idea – how about I design an adjustable bed platform, where the whole platform is able to be slid forward and back, and the rearward section could be angled up to allow the rest of the platform to be pushed back toward the rear doors? Some quick scribbles later and I figure I can pull back around 18 inches – a foot and a half – using this method. This would also give me a sort of couch space when the bed is stowed away.

I started brainstorming different ideas on how to pull this design off. I’ve gone through two or three revisions in my head and on paper on most every aspect of this design. The primary design problem is how to get the rear section of the bed platform to rise up. My first idea, which I thought was brilliant (and later I realized was clunky) was to use garage door tracks and rollers. Straight lengths of track with a section of curved track at the bottom, mounted to the walls, and the door rollers mounted on the rear platform in the correct spot would allow that section to begin moving when pushed from the front (the roller being in the curved track when the platform is deployed, so there’s room to get it moving).

At the same time, I was pondering how to have the main platform be both attached to the main frame, and also slideable. At this point I’ve completely forgotten what my plans were on that front, that’s the distant past.

And then I realized the garage door track plan was ridiculous and would be not only ugly, but potentially injurious if one were to whack it with an arm in the middle of the night. At this point I began pondering a simple pivot system – two posts mounted onto both the main frame and the rear platform, positioned in the correct positions so that when the platform is deployed, there’s a bit of angle to the pivot to allow the platform to be pushed back and stowed, and the pivots would support the rear platform when in the vertical position. But I soon tossed this idea out as well, simply because it would require the main platform frame to have vertical supports in two places at the very rear of the garage, and then the pivot mounting hardware would need to stick out the sides of those supports. All this hardware would limit the potential use of the garage space beneath.

Later on, I learned about linear actuators. These are electric-powered devices that can extend and retract when a current is applied – a long threaded post is spun within a nut in the housing, so the post remains in whatever position it was when the current was removed. These devices would work much like the previous pivot design, except there would not be as much of a need, if any, to mount the lower ends farther beneath the platform for them to function as designed.

At this point I started going down the 80/20 rabbithole. 80/20 is an extruded aluminum rail product that is super-strong and very light, and as I come to find out, many amateur and professional van builders use this material in many aspects of their builds. 80/20 offers a lot of accessories and add-ons, some of which function as slides, so I began eyeing these rails and accessories as a good solution to both the main structural base of the platform as well as a method of getting the platform to slide back and forth easily.

About this time I happened upon this fellow’s solution. I first found the video posted by the mountain biker, whose van this was built in, but the video posted by the craftsman who designed and built the whole thing is a better video to watch. This guy has done almost exactly what I want to do – including accomodating for bike storage beneath the bed platform!

The thing I don’t like (because I want my design to be snazzy and sharp) is the rope-pull solution to lift the rear platform. I’m not knocking it, mind you, but I’d prefer another solution. But this video was a relief to find, as it showed me that I wasn’t crazy in wanting to do this design, that it is a viable plan; and also, I found the use of the polyethylene plastic for the sliding aspect to be brilliant.

Polyethylene is the plastic typically used for water tanks, and it appears that’s what this fellow used in this design. But there’s a variation of this material called Ultra-High Molecular Weight polyethylene, or UHMW. The main difference is UHMW is self-lubricating, making it ideal for this use!

I began revising my plan (again) with UHMW in mind. Obviously to use it for the base platform sliding function, but also, another revision of the “how do I get the rear platform up and down”. Me being me, I’m trying to do this so the whole thing works great but also is a smart, elegant solution. And the plan I came up with was similar to the garage door rail/roller system; to take the basic shape of that (a long angled straight section with a curved portion below) and build a recessed track into the van wall, lined on three sides with thin strips of UHMW, and then mount a thick spring-mounted bolt onto both sides of the rear platform section, which would slot into this recessed track and guide the rear platform up and down. It would need to be spring-loaded thanks to the slight curvature of the van walls as they reach up to the roof; the rear platform section would also need to be trimmed down to accomodate the wall curvature when raised.)

At this time, I’m waffling between the recessed-track/UHMW plan and returning to the linear actuator plan. Recently a woman on Facebook posted in one of the various vanlife-oriented groups about her build in progress, a build she’s hired someone else to design and install. She posted a small video of a countertop where the top half of it is built on tracks and uses an electric motor to inch its way forward a foot or so; I asked her “why?” as this made no sense on the face of it. Turns out this builder is going to install a sliding bed system very much like I’ve been thinking about, and is going to make that platform deploy and stow with the touch of a switch – and the reason for the sliding counter was to get out of the way of the sliding bed. Intrigued, I asked her about the design, and no surprise, she really had no idea what this builder had in mind, but she did have a list of parts he had her order for the project, and she sent me screenshots of the order screens – and there they are, linear actuators! I’m hoping in the near future, once her builder has got the bed platform built out, that I can get her to send me some photos so I can get a good idea how this fellow pulled off his plan.

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The other half of all this is under the bed platform, or to be more specific, bike storage.

My plan is to take two of my bikes on my travels – one road bike, one trail bike. I could easily solve the storage issue by throwing a hitch rack on the rear of the van and hauling the bikes that way; but I know, at some point, someone’s going to come along with bolt cutters. So outside storage is simply not an option.

Finding the bed platform and bike storage video above was such a weight off my mental shoulders; I figured it could be done but now I know it can be done. But my overall needs are going to be a bit different than Adam’s. For one, I intend to build out the typical tabletop-on-drawer-slides-under-the-bed feature; I plan to build a pair of small benches just forward of the garage wall, and the tabletop for use between those benches will be useful. I could build a tabletop that folds down and can be brought up and locked into place instead, but I expect I’ll installing a sliding tray into the bottom of the garage wall, likely for a 12v top-load fridge, so getting at that tray would be difficult with a tabletop deployed above. I still may change things up.

The driving factor in how high the base of the bed platform would need to be installed is the bikes. With the front wheels removed and the seatposts dropped, I’m looking at needing to have the bed platform around 33-34″ off the garage floor to fit the bikes in properly.

So, a sliding tabletop, depending on the width, is going to limit my vertical space beneath the bed platform. I expect the tabletop mounts (the thickest portion of the whole thing) will be three to four inches – if there’s overlap between the tabletop hardware and one of the bike seats, that’s space I will lose from the bed surface to the ceiling. My goal is to find a way to have the bikes and tabletop mounting hardware to not interfere with each other.

This morning, I went down to my garage, pulled out both bikes, removed both front wheels, and set them on the garage floor as close together as I could manage. One will need to be set back a few inches from the other, to allow the handlebars to nest a bit.

Now I have some general measurements; the maximum width of the handlebars of the pair of bikes is 27″; the width of the two bikes from the outermost pedals is 20″; and the width between the outside of each rear hub is 16″. The total length of the pair of bikes when set up like this is 64″. (This may be an issue…)

In theory, I could set up mounts for the pair of bikes well to one side of the garage space or the other, but the limiter there is the wheelwells. A bit of research later and I’ve got some measurements of the main cargo space and wheelwells of a Sprinter 170wb van. (I’m not 100% set on a Sprinter, but it’s my prime candidate right now, so I’m using its measurements for now.)

After a bit of hunting, I found the measurements I was after; between this illustration and another site, assuming these are all accurate, I now know how far forward the wheelwells start and end, how wide they are and how tall they are from the van floor.

The main van floor is 70″, but the width between the wheelwells is only 53″. It’s this measurement I have to work with, primarily.

My plan for the benches in front of the garage wall is, right now, going to leave me with 27″ wide of space in the center of the garage wall. Much of that will be used for a sliding tray or drawer. If I were to use all of it, that would leave only 13″ from the edge of that space to either wheelwell; not enough for the 16″ minimum width of the bikes at that point. Two options at this point; 1) make the sliding tray less wide overall, or 2) make the tray less wide but only on one side, so it’s offset a bit on the garage wall. This is a compromise I can handle, especially if the tray is still large enough to accomodate the top-load fridge I go with, should I choose that path.

I’ll likely also want to surround the wheelwells with a plywood box, so there is a level space on top; this will eat up probably another half inch of overall width that I’ll have to take into account.

I plan to set the bikes up so that they’re mounted alongside the passenger side wheelwell; this will put the derailleur of the closer bike on the opposite side.