Tilting bed
Steve Hodge, Baba 40 Alcyon 
September 17, 2008

Here are photos of one of my latest improvements to Alcyon.  I threw away all the cushions and jig-saw puzzle pieces of plywood that formed the V-berth platform and replaced them with a rigid sheet of plywood topped with a full foam mattress, with no seams or crevasses, and the top 2” being memory foam.  The plywood is hinged at the forward end, and a small 4:1 tackle at the aft end is used to lift that end up.   We can now access anything under the V-berth in less than a minute, without disturbing the bedding at all.  My wife was a bit dubious at first, but after her first use of it this past summer, she became an instant convert and absolutely loves it.  So do I.  Suddenly, a huge but almost unusable storage compartment is now just like any other compartment on the boat.  In fact, it’s quicker and easier to get stuff out of there than it is out of some of the compartments under the settee!

The entrance is offset on the BPT’s also (at least on the 40’s), but it simply means the “footprint”  of the entire thing is not symmetrical about the boat’s fore-aft centerline.   The forward, hinged end is centered, however.   

Although I made it sound simple, there are a couple of complications.  
 
The first is that in order for the bed to go up as high as possible, it needs to go up inside the cabin top.   If the entire “platform”, as I call it, hinged up the port, outermost corner would hit the side deck and prevent it from going high enough to provide good access (you would have to crunch yourself up to get to the forward half of the space).  Consequently, this outermost corner is a separate, small triangular shape which stays put.   It can still be lifted out of the way, but in practice it does not restrict one’s access to that compartment, so as I said it is basically just ignored.  Moreover, the “crevasse” between it and the main part is so close to the corner that I never in fact actually sleep on it, so never feel it.

The more discerning of you may notice that there are actually 3 pieces of plywood making up the platform, not just 2 as I said in an earlier post. Three allowed me to get it all out just one sheet of plywood. The plywood is 1/2" marine. If doing it again, I would just use 2 sheets of exterior grade (non-marine) plywood, which would have both saved money and all the extra work involved with 3 sheets...and given me some useful plywood left over.