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Outback Sleeping Platform
Overview
On roadtrips, it’s sometimes advantageous to be able to just pull to the side of the road and sleep for the night without having to mess about with tents or motels. However, sleeping in a car seat is not ideal and usually the floor of the vehicle is not flat. So, because flattening the floor is a lot of work, we’re going to platform over it!
This is a platform that is sized for the Subaru Outback 2014 with the passenger seat folded down.
Supplies
- 1x3 dimensional lumber
- 2x2 dimensional lumber
- 3/16” hardboard
- 1 1/4” deck screws
Details
Stage One: Idea and Validation
Dimensions were determined to be roughly 78/80” long and no more than 26” wide. These measurements are determined by the floor space of the cargo area of the Outback with only the passenger side seat folded down.
Stage Two: Platform Framework
To form the base of the platform, I decided on a skeleton of 1x3 dimenisonal lumber with the stiles having lap joints cut into them to support the rails. The rails will not have any cuts. On each end, a board will be attached to cap the open ends. It took a few iterations to come up with the design of how to attach the parts together, I finally settled on a simple full lap joint that was screwed together with the deck of the platform being attached to the top of the frame without any special joints.
I took 3 of the 1x3x8 pieces of lumber and cut them down to 78 1/2”. The odd size is to account for the 2 3/4” caps on the end for a rough finish length of 80”. I then taped all three together so I could cut all of the lap joints without having to worry about measuring between pieces. To determine the spacing of the rails, I took the overall length of the stile, subtracted 1 rail width, and divided by the number of spaces I wanted, in this case 5.
(78 1/2” - 2 1/2”) / 5 = 15.2”
Because I didn’t want to deal with a weird measurement (in this case, 1/5”), I rounded down to 3/16”. (Well, rounded to a tick mark on my tape measure.
I marked out the location of each rail, using a cutoff to determine the thickness of the dado.