Bed time in the Bus

With the first full weekend and 2 night stay looming i thought i'd better get the beds sorted, especially as there will be 6 of us at Brands!!

The bus came with lots of seats, 6 of which were the rather useful fold out ones with built in seat belts. I bolted 2 of these in for Mallory for seating, but also to start working out what i needed to do to turn them into a bench seat/bed. I had 2 right hand seats and 4 left hand seats, this meant that i could bolt the frame works in as if the seats were facing each other and retain the seat belts. I toyed with the idea of leaving them like this and just dropping a board on them to convert into a bed a night, but it would be a bit messy, plus the wheelarch means  that you sit at an angle. I therefore reverted to my original idea of hacking the backs off the seats, removing the base cushions and welding a framework up to connect the 2 seats. The back of one the chairs has been left in place as to show a reference to what i was doing, or it may have been because my grinder disintegrated while i was doing it ..........;-)

With the framework complete (and new grinder bought to remove seat back)  I fixed some 12mm MDF to the framework as a base for the cushion

Now that the seat backs were removed there was no pin for the locking mechanism to hold the seat up whilst in transit, so using some more MDF i made an end panel to hold the cushions in place, but also to mount the pin

With some matching backs for the cushions this should make a fairly nice sofa to lounge around on when its peeing down with rain outside. I now have to do the same to the otherside, paint the frameworks and cover the MDF in carpet