Honda Element Micro-camper

hi my name is Amy welcome to my Honda Element setup I designed this setup mainly for short camping trips or having a nice place to hang out read work a little bit when I was in transit going from so you can see the this bed platform is quite a bit lower than I think what's more common so I was optimizing up really straight use a laptop and I wanted to pick push in so there's definitely a compromise here storage space but so far I really like it it's really easy to use let me show you how [Applause] both the shelf and the bed are held in by two turnbuckles each there's one that are anchored to these attachment points that the element already has there's two at the back of the vehicle and then two more closer to the middle of the vehicle for both the bed in the shelf I was able to get these like pretty nice fitting contours and I did that by iteratively tracing and trimming cardboard pieces until the fit was was good and then I just used those pieces as as templates for tracing the plywood before I cut it there's that other turnbuckle okay this is a close-up view of the bed frame it's a pretty simple rectangular bed frame except it has these funny-looking pieces here to just bridge the gap it's also another blending shape patch they're not sure it's totally necessary but at least in this area it's nice to have the extra support for the mattress the pull-out frame is split into two halves so that expands all the way out the mattress can fill all the way up to the shelf and then this is separate mostly because it's easier to stand here and open one and then stand somewhere else and open the second one and also because where I'm sitting now I could put a cooler if I wanted to and so if it's just me one person with a cooler I can set up the bed on this side and then just have the cooler over here and not not full section out the mattress is actually just a four inch foam mattress I bought off Amazon this is the mattress cover that it came with I cut everything to shape I just used the same cardboard template for the wood on the mattress to get the shapes to match and then again the same templates to make these custom fitted sheets these curtains are one of the first things I added to the vehicle just because they were so easy I put a hook directly into the trim on either side and this elastic cord serves as the curtain rod and I don't know if they're necessarily the best curtains in terms of light ceiling or or thermal ceiling but they were really easy to put in and they're really quick and easy to use for these these windows sometimes I like to have these open when I'm slipping and so for bug netting I again carefully traced a piece of cardboard kind of trimmed it to get it to the right shape and use that to cut out this piece of mesh I reinforced the edges with duct tape and then just sewed velcro strip to it and so normally I just do that and that keeps the books out okay weird angle this is looking up at the moon roof usually it gets crazy hot with this open so I for years I just used a plastic clip like this on each side and shut the edge of it into the gasket here and one on one of these on each side does a really great job of keeping this guy in but recently I've been thinking about a more fun use of that space and so this is my latest addition it still uses the same concept to keep it in place so I've got plastic tabs here that I can rotate into place that locks the frame in and allows me to put my pad in and I can be really lazy and watch movies while lying down

Channel: Amy Makes Stuff

Views: 928,291

Keywords: honda, element, camper, camper van, conversion, laser cutter, diy

Id: qfIWjVnueSI

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2019