Foldable Car Camping Bed – The What

For my final Aesthetics of Design project, I was inspired by my work in another class. One of my other courses this semester was Design for Manufacturability (DFM), and for this class, we were tasked to come up with a novel product. First, coming up with a basic functional design, and then fully redesigning it for mass manufacturing with what we learned in class. For this project, my teammates and I designed a collapsible car bed. With all this time spent working on this bed design, I found that I would really like to make my own. I would like to credit my team for helping me with the designs for this project, although I did not end up using the final design from that class.

The basic design for my foldable car bed is to have panels on the top that can collapse onto one another. Originally I was looking into a very simple design where the sleeping platforms sit on detachable legs held on with pins. I really liked this design for its simplicity, however I had two problems with it. First is that this design would only be able to collapse to half its total size, so if i wanted to use every seat in my car then I would have to take this out of it. The other problem is the loose parts. While this was not a huge problem I wanted to try to make a design that is all self-contained.

Original Design

Ideally, I wanted to be able to fit this bed behind my back row of seats, meaning that it had to collapse from its full length, hopefully about 70″, into about 17″. When looking online I found many designs that used sliding mechanisms or hinges but all of them failed to be truly compact when collapsed. Originally I had looked to a design that uses pins because a hinge in between the two halves of the platform would be incredibly inconvenient to used inside the car, along with the problem where it likely would not have the clearance to actually fold underneath the ceiling of the car. However, if I made the platforms smaller and used more of them I could again use hinges, keeping everything all as one part, and I could collapse the entire thing into the form factor I was looking for.

Folding Panels

After coming up with this original design for a folding four paneled top, I had to find a way to support the bed panel. My solution was to use two long supports that could fold out perpendicularly to the top panels and a small support attached to the top panel that folds down.

View of the Supports

This was how I came to the basic form of the bed, and when it was folded together it became actually very compact. This was not however, where the design ended. Now the aesthetic touches needed to be added, because while the design seemed really exciting to me, it also looked rather bland.

Bed When Collapsed

I wanted to make this project fit into the cabincore aesthetic. And while this is also done by adding cozy blankets and cushions it starts with the look of the wood. To fit into this aesthetic the wood is stained to be a golden oak color, it has rounded edges and slight smooth curves. In order to make my project more fitting of this aesthetic I wanted to add large fillets on the corners of the panels, have filleted edges on all of he supports, and I wanted the spall head support to have large curves rather than being cut into a simple post or T shape.

Cabincore

As I gathered my materials and double checked measurements of my car I found that this design needed some changes. The first being that the 4 panel design made an awfully short bed, and because of the angle that the seats are at when stood up, I would actually have less space than I originally thought to store the collapsed bed. To fix these issues I resized the supports and platforms to be shorter and added an additional bed platform. I also make the edge fillets significantly deeper to both better fit against the back door, and to better pronounce the cabincore look.

Finished Bed – Unfolded

The final bed can be unfolded to about 67″ in length, and while this is a little short for me, I found that it is still quite functional. As the bed can be folded to fit into about 14″.

Finished Bed – Folded

Visually, I am extremely proud of how the design came out. I feel that the color of the wood looks really good and is exactly what I was looking for. The curves on the panels give it a simple comfortable appearance and even looks good when extended. And I think the black hinges make the whole project look very clean. Because of the extra platform the small head support could no longer be attached with a hinge onto the end of the top panel and has to be stored separately, and while this introduces a need for separate hardware and loose items, I believe it also helps with the appearance. While the curves cut into it fit the cabincore aesthetic, the part as a whole is not that visually appealing.

 

Supports

 

This project really accomplished my goals to have it fit the cabincore aesthetic, and fold into just the trunk space of my car. However, it has some major issues. Simply put, the .5″ wood I used for the platforms was just too thin, because the supports do not do a good enough job. When tested for the very first time the hinges on two different platforms pulled out. This was because a lot of weight was on these hinges rather than additional supports, and the screws had very limited grip when they are so short. This was extremely disappointing to me, as I was hoping to use this bed on a trip this summer. However, even if I salvage the bed with some thicker platforms, I worry that the bad support system will not allow this bed to be very functional.

Ripped Out Hinges

Sources:

Aston, D. w/ C. (2023, May 22). The Cozy Cabincore design trend perfect for a mountain retreat. DESIGNED. https://carlaaston.com/designed/cozy-cabincore-design-trend-perfect-for-mountain-retreat