Hello, Everybody,
We wanted to share our experience, completing our project to remove
the jackknife sofa from its place in the slide room, and replace it with two
reclining chairs. Most of us are probably familiar with the jackknife sofa: not
very comfortable, either to sleep on or to sit on.
Several member here online suggested that I could do the work myself,
and taking them up on it, I did the work, and this is the story.
Jon (Sunline Fan) has offered to help me with the posting of the photos
after I've posted this. Between he and I, we'll get it done, but it WILL be a
work in progress.
Here is the offending sofa. Let's get rid of it:
The easiest way to start is to remove the lower cushion. The cushion is
held on by 4 bolts, two on each end. (See arrow.) The cushion had to be
held up in the half-way position to reach the bolts.
Once the nuts are removed from the bolts, the bottom cushion lifts up, off
and out of the way.
With the lower cushion off, the steel frame of the sofa is exposed. The
steel side frames are mounted to the wooden under frame by 4 screws,
2 on each end. The front screw is easily accessed by a screwdriver or drill.
The screws are the typical RV square-driver type. The rear screws were
inserted at an odd angle, and required a flexible drill bit extender to reach into
them.
With both the bottom and top cushions removed, the wooden under frame
is completely exposed. The wooden frame is wrapped in carpet, and the
screws that hold the frame to the side walls and the dinette wall are hidden
under the carpet. The carpet strips are attached to the wooden frame with
umpteen dozen carpet staples. There appeared to be some adhesive applied,
also. The carpet staples do not remove easily, so we found that the only
quick way to remove the carpet was to pry it up with a sturdy screwdriver.
We had to rip the carpet loose from each staple, and at several points had
to cut the carpet away with a box cutter.
With the carpet removed, all the wood screws were exposed. For the
most part, they backed out easily. In one case, two screws had been driven
into the same hole. It took some doing to get them out. The head of one
screw was stripped, and required a tedious extraction, twisting it out with a
vise grip (locking pliers).
With the screws and the wooden frame removed, there were several small
screw holes left in the walls. Once the chairs were installed, the holes were
covered up. At some point next spring, I intend to caulk them over with
bronze and beige silicone.
Once all the screws were removed, the wooden framework lifted out
pretty easily. There did seem to be more of that adhesive that had to be
broken loose, but was not a problem. We were happy to discover that the
entire wooden frame work was mounted on top of the floor carpet. It was a
continuous sheet from front to back. No carpet fixing was required. At this
point, it became obvious that the cargo hatch door was pretty exposed. The
chairs cover the hatch, but the hatch is not insulated. In the spring, we plan
on covering the hatch with a cut-to-fit piece of furniture foam covered with
upholstery fabric, with a strap-style handle attached. The handle will allow us
to pull the foam snug against the door opening from outside. And we
discovered that, in this configuration, there is still just a little bit of storage
space behind the chairs. So the cargo hatch door is not completely useless.
(Think "Sewer Slinky", for example.)
With the sofa cleared out of the way, it took us about 30 minutes to
unload the chairs from the truck, situate them in their spots, and install the
backs. We angled them toward each other, leaving room on the right side for
the handle that operate the recliner mechanism. The fit was perfect, as
though they were designed for the space. The one modification that we felt
we needed was to remove the lower portion of the window valances. The
lower portion of the valances would have allowed the back of the chairs to
strike them, we thought. We could have fudged on that a little, moving the
chair frame a couple inches forward, to where they overhung the edge of the
slide-room floorboard. It probably wouldn't have hurt anything, but we
decided to go without the valances for now.
The chair installation seemed to enlarge the room, in that it put that
corner of the slider to better use. Our zero-gravity chairs used to clutter up
the living space, and are now gone, opening up the area. The chairs are
super comfortable, and watching TV and napping are great, now.
We were somewhat concerned with whether the legrests would extend
too far into the room, making it difficult to walk by. Turns out there is plenty
of room for walking.
Some of you may wonder if this mod has any weight issues. We didn't
weigh the chairs, exactly, but our best guess is, the two chairs outweigh the
old sofa by double. Guessing, again, that it would probably be equivalent to
the fold-out converta-bed that Sunline advertised as an option in this model.
We operated the slide room after the installation, and it operated normally.
With these improvements, itnow appears that there is a need for
additional 110 v. receptacles, for additional lighting and laptop computer
power. That will be the subject of a future post.
We'd like to give credit to several SOC members who encouraged me
to try to do this work on my own. It turns out not to have been very
technical at all, just requiring patience and persistance.
Special thanks to JohnB who posted something similar to this a couple
weeks ago, and who gave me good ideas. This will throw in my 2 cents
worth. Considering that General RV charges $111 an hour for labor, I figure
we saved over $200. That's a good chunk of diesel fuel!
Thanks for the advice. Enjoy the pics.
Dennis
Of all the pictures I took with taking that whole thing apart, none of it even shows the whole thing. It's essentially like 3/16" plate steel bent on a 90 degree angle and bolted to the side frame there, about where your bar bolts at. Then the bottom edge of the bottom cushion sits on the edge of that plate sticking over there.
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