Arden-HILO
New Member
Hi everyone! This is a project I have wanted to do for a while, and since I didn't see many photos of the steps of this type of conversion on a Hi-Lo I thought I would post what I did. Overall this was not too hard of a project, but took me some thinking to get it how I wanted it.
My wife and son have been really enjoying camping for the past year and a half in the Hi-Lo, but I found we never had a circumstance where it was worth the trouble to put away the bed and convert to a sofa while camping. Also the sofa bed is just uncomfortable to us. We tried adding layers of foam, etc, but that really didn't help, and since my son sleeps in the loft, it made our bed feel cramped below.
My trailer is a 2204T with the front sofa/bed and loft bed above it.
You can see in the attached images a before/after and some chalkboard sketches of how I planned to make a bed platform. My idea was to do a sliding slat system. The idea is this would be low profile, and allow me to push the slats in to the same width as the original sofa should I ever want more floor space. This created an RV twin XL platform. I designed this so the slats could extend the bed platform to a Full XL size (same as the original jackknife bed size).
I also wanted to maintain the original fabric covered storage panels that were below the sofa- I converted the drawer to a fold down door. I also wanted to avoid any additional visible supports to keep floorspace and storage access open, so I used a piece of 1 1/4" angle iron on the front rail to support the sliding part of the slats. There is a span of about 5' unsupported, but this ended up being sturdy. I also wanted to keep things as light as possible to avoid increasing trailer weight or tongue weight.
I started by unbolting the jackknife sofa (mine was literally only held on by three screws - which were accessed form underneath without much trouble.
My wife and son have been really enjoying camping for the past year and a half in the Hi-Lo, but I found we never had a circumstance where it was worth the trouble to put away the bed and convert to a sofa while camping. Also the sofa bed is just uncomfortable to us. We tried adding layers of foam, etc, but that really didn't help, and since my son sleeps in the loft, it made our bed feel cramped below.
My trailer is a 2204T with the front sofa/bed and loft bed above it.
You can see in the attached images a before/after and some chalkboard sketches of how I planned to make a bed platform. My idea was to do a sliding slat system. The idea is this would be low profile, and allow me to push the slats in to the same width as the original sofa should I ever want more floor space. This created an RV twin XL platform. I designed this so the slats could extend the bed platform to a Full XL size (same as the original jackknife bed size).
I also wanted to maintain the original fabric covered storage panels that were below the sofa- I converted the drawer to a fold down door. I also wanted to avoid any additional visible supports to keep floorspace and storage access open, so I used a piece of 1 1/4" angle iron on the front rail to support the sliding part of the slats. There is a span of about 5' unsupported, but this ended up being sturdy. I also wanted to keep things as light as possible to avoid increasing trailer weight or tongue weight.
I started by unbolting the jackknife sofa (mine was literally only held on by three screws - which were accessed form underneath without much trouble.
