Grand Plan: The Electric Shady Couch

It’s been a while. I’ve been obsessing mostly over travel until recently, when I saw the “Festival Couch” at Rainbow Serpent festival. Basic concept: take one couch, add wheels and a motor and you have transport around the festival plus a comfy place to sit. I’d seen it at Rainbow previously, but as I have a bit more time on my hands at the moment, the idea took hold a little more… It’s not original I admit, it’s been done a bunch of times according to the internet, but it will be a very interesting project for me.

I have the following goals:

• Comfortable transport and seating for two people
• Able to carry a smallish chilly bin (“esky” if you’re Australian… “Cooler” if you’re American) along with the two people if necessary. Doesn’t have to be as comfortable though 🙂
• Made with primarily hand tools, as I don’t have a workshop
• Transportable without a truck or trailer (my car doesn’t have a tow bar)
• Solar powered. No one likes the noise of small petrol engines.
• Has an awning/cover to provide shade… Critical at summer festivals.

With those in mind, I decided that instead of converting a normal couch (as I have seen others do) and adding wheels, I will build a frame out of aluminium angle and add cushions later. In this way I don’t have a heavy couch frame to move around (meaning it’s more efficient) and if I bolt the frame together (instead of welding) I can take it to pieces for transport. Plus I don’t have a welder. Or welding skills. Bolts I can do.

I am also going with a differential steering system – that is, a separate motor will control the left side drive wheel to the right side drive wheel. A bit like a tank. In this way I can avoid the complexity of a steering rack.

For the initial phase of construction I’m focusing on building the bottom plate – basically a rectangular frame with the wheels and motors mounted. I’m trying to do my spending in stages (just in case this is another Fad That Gets Boring) so the first stage is:

• Two ~1.5kW electric motors from Cyclone (just arrived today – super fast delivery!)
• Four wheels from a Schwinn Electric Scooter, which include drive sprocket and brakes. Buying this as a unit will save a fair amount of fabrication that I would have to pay a workshop for. I made all four wheels the same (even though I’m only planning to drive two of them) because it means I can make it 4WD later if I like, and also to get the band brake.
• Equal angle aluminium – Alloy 6061-T6, 63.5mm x 63.5mm x 6.35mm. Based on some back of the envelope calculations drawing from the learnings of the single civil engineering paper I did at University over 10 years ago… This should be strong enough?
• Flat bar aluminium – again alloy 6061-T6, 150mm x 6mm. This will be used for joining the angle aluminium at the corners, a bit like a nail plate.

Now to start building…