Raised Floor
Alright, something that is actually a "build" rather just a "buy" now!
For the bed build out there are many awesome examples on the forums. The new Goose Gear stuff that Dave is showing is pretty awesome. For right now though I'm pretty sure I just don't know exactly what the best option would be for me. Until I use it a bit I don't think I could do a decent specific full build for the bed and get it "right". I do know that I'd like to be able to hole up in inclement weather without tripping over my gear. I also know that in general I'd like to encourage being outside the truck so that we are enjoying actual camping in the "outdoors" rather than sitting in a built out bed. And I'd like to make best use of the rather small 5ft bed. Some of the bed build out decisions interact with other build decisions of course.
I thought about this a lot and came up with these guidelines:
- I don't plan on a swing out bumper, so water needs to be stored in the bed
- I rarely carry extra fuel but I do carry a usually empty fuel can for the times I do need some
- I'll have chairs, tables and other "big" things that won't fit in crates with other smaller camp gear
- Plan on occasional "dirty" or "wet" things I wouldn't want to dump in the living space
- The wheel wells are annoying to step, sit and work around
- In foul weather it is annoying to live amongst camp gear you'd normally have unpacked
With all that in mind and having seen some nice raised floors (sometimes called "sleeping platforms") constructed using the built in lips and notches in the Tacoma's composite bed I decided the first iteration of my build should be a raised floor. This will get the living space above the annoying wheel wells, allow most of the bulky gear to be stored under the living space and creates a "dirty" or "wet" zone under the "clean" and "dry" living space. Given how tall the FlipPac tent is when opened it seemed being on a 9 inch raised floor shouldn't be an issue. I did wonder if the raised floor would make entering the FlipPac from the back more awkward or what other unknown problems there might be. But it seemed simple and cheap enough to just build it and live with it awhile to find out.
Again, my truck lives in Las Vegas while I live in Baltimore and so that makes doing any sort of "building" a bit annoying as I don't have a garage full of tools or anything else we take for granted when doing mods. Any tool I need lives in the truck and my building is done in the outdoors.
So, the day after the FlipPac was installed I spent most of the day in the parking lot of the Barstow, CA Home Depot building my raised floor. I built it with the FlipPac open to provide more space and light for working. This attracted a lot of attention. I'd been warned about parking lot discussions slowing you down, but this was insane. No less than six people came and asked about it and asked where to get one. I handed out FRP business cards to those six. A fair number of other people stopped and asked general questions or commented on it but weren't interested in getting one themselves.
The easiest way to discuss and illustrate the build is to show a picture of the partial build:
Partially built raised floor
Some things to note:
- With the FlipPac installed you can't rotate a full width plywood sheet down onto the raised floor lip of the bed. The lip of the FlipPac sticks too far in. So you are forced to build the raised floor as two halves.
- The Tacoma bed has two cut outs specifically for cross beams for a raised floor. I've used 1x4 boards (truly 1" in dimension as the notches are exactly 1" deep - if you use standard lumber sizes you'll need to use a 2xSomething and then route down the ends to be 1").
- Hard to see but there is also a lip running the full length of the bed on both sides that the edges of the plywood sit upon. Toyota did a great job putting this very functional aid into their composite bed to make a simple raised floor requiring no support from the bottom of the bed itself.
- In constructing from a single 4x8 sheet of plywood you can't have a single or two half boards running the full length of the bed since the final floor dimensions are about 57" square. This was fine for me as I wanted a removable section at the front of the bed. Thus the large rear portions are 4 ft long leaving about 10" to be covered by "scraps" from the 4x8 sheet.
- Note the 1x4 attached down the center of the half board installed. This provides additional stability from sag and ensures that if standing on just one half board you don't have only one half sag. Note that there is no need to attach this board to the cross beams in anyway. Just adding a support beam and attaching it at multiple points with screws prevents sagging. Attaching the ends to the cross beams would do nothing structurally to improve the situation. The sag is prevented by the tensile strength of the 1x4 and this strength has nothing to do with end support - it has everything to do with the 1x4 being securely attached to the plywood above it in multiple points.
- The water cans (and fuel can still wrapped in paper in this photo) are meant to be stored lying flat underneath the floor. But because I'm not 100% sure how I'll use the configuration I made sure to locate the forward cross beam such that there is the option to store them vertically and be held in place by the cross beam against the front of the bed. The cross beam notches in the bed are wider than 4" so I had some flexibility to do this. It also worked out nicely as this left about 2" to support the large boards and 2" to support the small boards that will cover the front most portion of the bed.
- I've used a hand saw to trim the rear most corner of the board to match the shape of the rear of the bed. The bed steps in as you get near the tailgate. This step in notch combined with the position of the rear most cross beam (to which the plywood is screwed) prevents the floor from sliding fore or aft.
The rest of the plywood arranged in place makes the full floor look like this:
All four plywood sections laid out
Note that not everything is screwed down at this point and we are still missing a rear support 1x4 that will go right along the back edge at the tail gate. Much like the mid support 1x4 described earlier the ends of this one are not supported by anything - simply screwing it at multiple points to the plywood above provides the tensile strength to greatly reduce sagging.
The frontmost two small plywood sections are also joined together using a small section of 1x4 in a similar fashion such that they act as a single wide board. They are in halves only because everything came from a single 4x8 sheet and smaller pieces were all that was left. Because this section is only 10" long it can be rotated and placed in as a single wide piece without interference from the FlipPac lip. This section is supported on the sides not just by a thin lip in the bed but rather the full wheel wells and the rear portion by the 1x4 cross beam. So it is only the corners in the center right up against the front of the bed that need stabilization from a small section of 1x4.
After getting all that screwed down it was just a matter of adding some carpet. I used a outdoor rug that I trimmed to a custom fit. I wrapped it around the rear of the floor for a finished look and to prevent scrapes and splinters when entering and exiting. I used a ghetto carpet installation technique developed successfully in a college dorm room decades ago - U-nails (sometimes called chicken-wire nails) are what holds the carpet down. With the carpet installed the final floor looks like this:
There was a large scrap from the rug and for now I put it below the floor as a crappy bed liner. This was to make it easier to slide things in and out and reduce rattles when driving. It was a good experiment and I want to do something like that permanently, but just having the scrap down there is not functional as it slips and slides around too much. I did realize from the experiment that whatever goes down there should be made long enough to roll out onto the tailgate when open.
Here's what it looks like underneath with the cans stored below the floor at the front of the bed:
Water and fuel cans stored under the floor
I'm happy storing full water cans like that. The Scepter 20L cans don't seem to leak at all and even if they do water down there is no big deal. The fuel can I would store vertically elsewhere in the bed on top of the raised floor when full. Again, I'd rarely use it and if I did would of course empty it into the fuel tank as soon as possible. But again, my truck has to hold everything I might ever need since I don't have a garage to store things I don't need on a given trip. So most of the time the fuel can will lie empty and horizontal under the floor.
As mentioned that front most 10" section is designed to be removable primarily to gain access up there for cleaning or other maintenance. As a secondary function cans could be stored vertically up there. These three pictures show the front section closed completely, carpet pulled back for access and with the 10" section removed showing the cans below.
Forward removable floor section
And finally this shows the current loading of the bed with the raised floor. Lots of long thing things (chairs, tables, cots) and potentially dirty things stored under the bed with a cooler and two action packers stored above. With the packers on the side and the cooler acting as a step up to the FlipPac bed nothing has to be moved or removed for inclement weather living in the bed. The cooler and packers act as seats or tables as needed. In fair weather the packers would likely come out of the bed into the outdoor camp area (envisioned in the future as being under a Fiamma awning on the side). Note also that with the raised floor the bed rail system now rides at the mid point of the cooler and packers rather than just above or at their very tops. This makes securing them from sliding using bed rail rings or cleats much more functional and practical.
Sample packing using raised floor
After camping in this for a few nights with the raised floor I am very happy so far. Getting in and out of the back is just fine with the floor and it creates a nice open and square living space without wheel wells in the way. I imagine at some point I will do a fancier build once I better understand how I use the space, but for now this has proved to be a cheap, easy and extremely flexible way to build out the back.
