Mwilliamshs
Explorer
I really need to draw this up (EDIT: scroll down) but I'm at work (3:44a local time) and wanted to document this idea before I lost it...okay so imagine a regular SMB door galley box mounted to the left-hand barn door of a Ford (not a sliding door, obviously). I want a two-burner stove (assume coleman-esque for now) on top of the box so it's at a normal counter height with doors shut whilst inside the van. Now open the side doors and this galley box changes in one of a variety of ways so that the stove is at a comfortable height for use standing outside the van. The simplest thing I can think of door box or shelf of sufficient depth for the stove sit atop (say 14" maybe) at about the base of the door window and a folding shelf maybe a foot to 18" inches below that for use when standing outside. To use: you're standing inside the van, (penthouse roof btw) picking up the stove (and probably releasing some stove-securing brackets or mounts to do so), folding the upper shelf (it'd be in the way when using the lower shelf), stepping outside, lowering a bottom shelf, then setting the stove on that. That's not exactly simple in my book, especially if you've started a pot of something to cooking inside then moving it outside. A more complicated idea for construction but simpler for actual day-to-day use would be a cabinet mounted to the door on locking drawer slides or some-such running vertically so the cabinet is at counter height when standing inside then slides down the 18" or so to use while standing on the ground. This is definitely more complicated to construct but to use it you could just open the door, step out, unlock the slides and slide-down the cabinet to its lower stop. Obviously you're basically lifting the weight of the cabinet, stove, and other contents but you're not picking up and holding the stove whilst folding shelves and stepping outside, etc. You could also have an actual cabinet here with things in it, rather taking up the entire door with two shelves that can't be used at the same time anyway. Am I crazy?
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. While I'm away at school and working 80+ hrs a week means Art and I don't see much of one another these days. Looking at pictures of it and scaling from that I'm gonna guess the floor height (the floor, like between rear fenderwells, not the step-in height, like just inside the front or side doors) is about 24". The floor is about even with the lower body line (not the bottom edge of the rocker panels, but rather the line above that where Fords either have some aluminum trim like mine or a design relief on the newer ones) I think and that line on my van with ~28" tall 235/75-15s is about 3-4 inches below the top of the tires. Close enough for government work...why do I care? The height of the van floor measured from the ground should dictate (approximately) the distance between the two stove heights. If you're standing outside and the stove is at 35" (my personal worktop preference) above the ground [position A], it should also be approximately 35" above the van floor when using it inside [position B] so the difference between A and B is the distance between the ground and the van floor. This is also the distance a cabinet would need to slide up and down if used as described in previous post. Obviously if there was some immovable obstruction in the way, like in the frame of the door there was a brace or whatever you'd have to adjust the dimensions or design to allow for that. Furthermore, the higher from the ground your floor, the more difficult this moving cabinet idea becomes. If you have 36" tires and the van floor is 2" above that (it would need to be, at a minimum) you now need ~12" more cabinet travel than I do with my 28" tires. Eventually the two heights (36" from ground and 36" from van floor, separated by a distance ~ that between the ground and the van floor) will exceed available real estate of the door itself if tires get too big.
