If I'm going to live in my car for the next year, a few additions are going to be needed to make living and sleeping in it a bit easier. But, one important goal of this build is to not do any permanent modifications to the car. All additions need to be reversible so that the car can be put back together when this crazy adventure comes to an end.
I started by first looking up how to remove my backseat on youtube, which was surprisingly simple. The entire seat cushion is one solid piece of foam, and simply popped out of place. Then, the rear seats are held in with only 6 size 12 bolts that came out lickity-split.
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| Stripped Out Rear |
Next up was to remove the seat belts since that's valuable space, and i don't want those running through my sleeping/living area. Again, this was a simple task only needing a size 14 socket wrench. The tricky part was the top of the seat belts are anchored below the rear dash, which now had to be disassembled. To do that, the rear side panels had to be removed, as well as the rear brake light.
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| Rear Side Panels Removed |
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| Removed Rear Dash |
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| All the seat belts. labeled and taped for identification |
Now that the major parts were out, it was time to clean, and put stuff partially back. I took a shop vac to the car and cleaned out all the random dirt and stuff that had acquired over the life of the car. Then I put the rear dash, rear brake light and side panels back. Now, it was time to start building out the "platform."
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| Demolition complete, time to start building |
I started off with a 2x6 piece of scrap wood that just so happened to fit nearly the whole width of the car. It balanced on the ridge where the seat cushions used to be and worked as a solid base to work from.
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| A notch was cut out for a slight bump in the frame. and the original seat anchor points. |
From here, I needed to figure out how to properly cut out the strange angles of the car. I found that only one major cut was needed to curve around the old seat corners. The rest would just lay flat and be fine. I used scrap cardboard to slowly cut away at to fit the door mold.
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| Sizing the cardboard for fit |
The cardboard was then traced on to the MDF board that would be the base and with a skill saw, cut out. The fit was almost too good to be true!
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| It fits and the door closes! |
Thanks to the fact that the car is symentrical in the back seat, the same cardboard template worked for the other side as well. I cut another piece of MDF to size, used the template to cut it out, and it fit like a glove.
And here it is! the final platform!
All in all it was about a days work getting to this point. But a lot of progress! The trunk into the main cab was now level (as level as the car is in the garage). But I also fit! Next up are finishing touches and putting the bed in.
