The deciding factor for us to get a flatbed vs a slide-in model was the floorplan. More specifically, it was a vision of being able to comfortably sleep our family of four in the camper. This vision was to turn the rear dinette/bed into a bunk bed configuration.
My original idea was to drill through the sides of the camper and mount a hanging cot above the rear bunk. However, I started to get cold feet about the idea of piercing the skin of the camper and started to think hard about how else could I get another bed back there.
Then I found this product: the disc-o-bed. The disc-o-bed is a set of stacking cots. What I found interesting about this product was that it's the only cot I've seen that doesn't need any center support. My plan quickly changed and I thought if I could just put one of these cots on top of the existing bed, I'd be done! The only trick is that the cots are a bit too wide. This post is about how I modified the cot to fit.
I'll start off with a shot of the finished product:
Ta-da! It came out great, and was easy to do. The only thing left would be to notch 2 of the cushions so that I can get all 4 cushions to fit beneath it, but for now it should work as-is because my kids are still shorter than 3 of the cushions put together.
I bought the full set of 2 stacking cots for this project (because I couldn't find anyone selling just a single disc-o-bed cot). I used what would have been the "upper" cot, because it has the straight legs. This was important because I ended up raising the bed on 2 sets of leg extenders. The kit came with 1 set of leg extenders, and 1 set of legs that are supposed to mate with the bottom bunk. First job was to modify the legs with the curved bottom to turn them both into straight-tube extension legs:
Chop! After removing the part of the leg that mates with the bottom bunk, I fitted the rubber feet that came with the extension legs:
Now I had a set of 4 extension legs and 4 modified standard leg risers:
I figured to get the cot to be the width I needed to fit in the camper, I needed to shorten the whole thing by 5.75", so I sawed that amount off the two center poles:
Then I cut a slit in the cot fabric for the new shorter pole to come out:
Here's a test-fit in the camper with no cot fabric:
And a bonus shot of some enthusiastic product testers:
All in all, very easy "mod". Just a measuring tape and a hacksaw needed. I'm sure someone a bit more clever than I could make one of these themselves from scratch, but I appreciated the ease of just modifying an existing cot design.