Saturday, March 14, 2015

Is a Murphy Bed feasible in the Quonset?

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This is a post in the construction subseries of the off-the-grid main series of posts.

In order to have a useful structure on wheels, like the one that I am contemplating, the Murphy Bed arrangement is key.  How to make this work?  The Murphy Bed will take up almost all the space inside the little Quonset on Wheels.  To get an answer to this question, I studied the Greenhouse video, and made several screenshots.  These are useful for building it out on the exterior, but also to visualize what it will look like on the interior so that a question like this can be answered.  If it can be, it will be possible to outfit it with just more than a bed, and make it much more useful.

Let's look at the Quonset as it is completed.

Pivoting the Murphy Bed allows access to the rest of the Quonset.  Elegant solution if I say so meself.

Note the lines I put in from about a third of the way up.  This is a marker for how high I may want the Murphy Bed to be.  When it is folded up from that height, it runs into the ceiling rather quickly.  This is a problem.

To solve that problem, the Murphy bed can be lowered, but that interferes with the storage below.  What if you pivot the bed so that the right side on this screenshot goes lower, then this allows the left side to go higher.  In fact, the Murphy Bed could go all the way to the ceiling at its highest point.  Yay!

The Pivot could run down the center, or slightly off center.  There would be locking mechanisms that lock it into place so it won't fall down on your unlucky head.

So, when you enter the door for beddie by, lowering the Murphy Bed into position by removing the lock.  Gravity will pull it down to the level of the pivot.  The pivot needs to be high enough to allow storage underneath.

The easiest solution for putting up the Murphy may leave it rather high.  If it gets too high for easy access, a ladder may be constructed.

Updates:

It may be hard to see from all of these lines, but I think Pythagorean Theorem will show that the Murphy Bed will definitely fit inside the Quonset.  Consider a line drawn from the top of the door jam to the lower corner and you'll get the length of the bed or longer when you solve for the hypotenuse.

Pythagorean Theorem:  A square plus B squared equal C squared.  Take sqrt(C) and it will be greater than length of the bed.  The ellipse will show the travel of the bed around the pivot point.

It will pivot around rebar that should fit into the axle of one of my old dolly wheels.  The wheels have bearings, so it will be a smooth action.  The rebar is 4 ft, and will just about fit the width of the trailer.

The rest of the hardware needed is trivial, no need to mention.  I'm quite confident that it will work fine.


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