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At this stage these beds are still costly to produce. The niche nature of this kind of product cannot be produced cheaply. In time I hope to be able to introduce savings in cost which can follow from the streamlining of production. So for now I am looking at prices in excess of £10 000 depending on the individual specifications of the beds required.

The bed shown in the video and photos shows has been adapted to enable training for rock climbing. However this is just a starting point. These beds can be customised to fit in with any requirements that you might have. 

Please feel free to contact me to discuss your requirements. Mobile: 07817 801 086. Email: charlie@kiwanda.co.ukmers 

Back in the late 1980’s while attending a training course in preparation for going to Tanzania to work for VSO, I met my mentor, Chris Wallace. Chris was the son of the “Bouncing Bomb” inventor Barnes Wallace and was to be my tutor on the Appropriate Technology course. Wearing an old boiler suit and with bushy grey hair and beard, Chris quickly went on the offensive with a series of questions to the class. “If you were siting a gate post for a 5 bar gate in a hole, would you place it in the middle, the left or the right of the hole?” “And why?” Simple questions you might think but Chris’ answers were not what was expected. He quickly gained the respect and confidence of most of the class, which was made up mainly of tradesmen and engineers. While he was a trained engineer, he had little time for his colleagues. For him you needed to have an understanding of the forces at work in any structure or device. You couldn’t rely solely on formulae and tables, because what if they were wrong. Or you wanted to create something new.

You couldn’t just copy old designs because you may unwittingly reproduce their mistake. Chris was an amateur windmill restorer and he told us how a redundant feature in the cogs of one old mill had been replicated for around 800 years in mills throughout the country. 

Chris’ method was to come up with a design and then make a working model of it, with which to test his hypothesis. When we were looking at roof truss designs for example, he had most of the class piling onto the hastily made structures and jumping up and down on them to see what happened.

So it was with this sort of reasoning in mind that approached my project for a retractable bed.

This was the idea. What if you had a bed that could fold flat against a wall and that could double up as a climbing training wall? You would get the benefit of all that freed up floor space plus the fun of being able to climb in your bedroom!

I spent the Christmas of 2014 in South Africa with my sister, Jane and brother-in-law, Roger. Roger is American and a highly experienced mechanical engineer who for a lot of his career worked for The American Can Company designing all sorts of intricate production machines. He and Jane now run a vineyard near the Canadian border. 

I showed Roger some of my sketches for the bed. The feel of it was that it would be simple and functional and with all the mechanical processes visible. Roger introduced me to the concept of mechanical advantage –the advantage gained by using a mechanism to transmit force. These include things like levers, cogs and pulleys. He also showed me how to calculate the forces at work. 

In the case of my wall bed the main mechanism at work would be the pulley block. A pulley block, usually know as just a pulley is a block or casing in which one or more pulleys are mounted. By connecting two of these you double the lifting power of the counter weight. So in the case of the climbing bed, where 4 blocks are used, you increase the lifting power by a factor of four. 

The original wall bed would have a pivoting bed within a standing frame. The bed would be connected to the frame by an axle which would have a lever on its outside end and this lever would be attached to a climbing rope. The rope would pass through a series of pulley blocks with a counterweight supplied by climbing sand-bags. This weight could be adjusted by adding or subtracting sand. It was all so simple.

As an experienced woodworker of many years I wanted a bed that would be made of beautiful timber and jointed with hand cut dovetails and with wedged through-tenons. I also wanted a proper sprung mattress for comfort and quality. Above all this bed would be a thing of beauty in its own right. 

Of course this would all weigh quite a lot- but I could always add more sand!

On returning from South Africa I set about making a Chris Wallace type working model. I made the structure out of mdf, plywood and some heavy hand rail dowelling that I had spare. It sucked! The mdf bent, the dowel slipped and the clothesline pulley groaned. But it did kind of work.

Clearly a full sized bed and wall frame would be needed as well a decent mattress if this concept was going to be tested in a meaningful way

Using some Douglas fir timber that I had left over from a previous job I set about crafting my hand cut dovetail bed and frame. At last it was taking shape. But would it actually work?

Rob the mechanic next door to my unit on the Oakendene Industrial Estate donated some ball bearings from an old Toyota. These would reduce friction where the axle passed through the wall frame. Dougie an itinerant Scottish panel beater and sometime precision engineer from the back of his van, made a cam mechanism from some scrap steel which would serve as a lever for helping to raise and lower the bed. The quadrant shaped cam would be embedded in a similarly shaped block of wood which would have a grooved rim to take the rope.

Dougie was convinced that the 10mm diameter bar that had been salvaged from an old van’s suspension would be strong enough to serve as the axle between the bed and the wall frame. Once the components had been made I rigged up a system with the climbing rope travelling from the cams, through the pulley blocks and attached to the sand bags.

At first it seemed that he was right. There was some assistance offered when raising the bed. But there was also lot of resistance whether going up or down. Within a few minutes however, the cams started slipping. The components couldn’t take the strain. 

Having to work on the bed in between paid work meant that weeks could go by without anything being achieved. It would be a few months before both Dougie and I had the time to try a different approach.

This time we moved up to a heavier axle and thicker steel plate. We again set about rigging up the system for testing. This time the system worked a little better… The bedframe was however creaking under the strain of the force. And then the cams started sliding again! The welded joint could not take the strain.

By this stage I could see that the principle worked, but I could also see that we were a long way from my goal of having a silky smooth, Rolls Royce type mechanism that would work beautifully and have people going “wow!”

After two and a half years of stop/start development and little prospect of any financial return, I could easily have shelved the project and concentrated on something more certain pay the bills. 

On a visit to the USA in 2017 I met up again with Roger on his vineyard in upstate New York. When I told him all the problems encountered and the very remote possibility of any payback, he said something which changed the game for me. His message was that however hard it may seem to carry on, it was essential that after so much effort that I must complete the job. Even if only for my own sake. Without this I would never know if it could work. I would always be left asking myself that question if I didn’t finish the project.

That became my interim goal. I was doing it for my own sanity and so that I could move on to other projects with the confidence that I could see them through. 

After a hiatus of several months I got talking to John, a retired blacksmith who lives on our industrial estate. John is a fellow refugee from domestic strife and we’ve often shared a glass of red wine in his static caravan down by the pond. He convinced me to up the spec and spend some real money on both engineering components and expertise. He intuitively appreciated the immense forces involved in trying to assist with in the lifting of a heavy load against a very negative fulcrum ratio. 

Imagine trying to raise a long plank up to vertical while holding just one end. 

Without some sizeable steel components that had been machined to a high tolerance of accuracy, you didn’t have a prayer.

Out would go Rob’s leftover car bearings and Dougie’s back of the van engineering. In would come carefully chosen bearings with housings custom made by Colin and Mark at Cowfold Precision Engineering (also on the estate). CPE also made new axles and cams all in a much heavier gauge of steel.

As the Oakendene internal economy operates on a system of favours, I had to wait quite some time for the components I’d drawn out to be completed. Six months in fact! 

Rob welded on the new axle to the old mounting plate, but as soon as the mattress was in place, you could hear a familiar shearing noise. The weld didn’t hold and there was a sickening feeling that after all this time and money we might be back to square one. 

We beefed up the thickness of the mounting plate and this time Andy from JS Engineering welded it with his big girder welder. It’s held, but then the surrounding wood started to creak. 

The nice thing I was learning about steel is that if you have a problem, you can always weld on a bit more. The weld is in fact, the strongest part of the structure. So we added a long strip of metal to the mounting plate right the way down the length of the bed so as to support the legs too. Surely this would work? 

No. This time the bed would go up with a bit of a struggle but it was not happy going down. In particular there was too much force coming from the cam to allow the bed to move away from the upright position. 

So the cams went back to CPE to be reshaped. They were again very busy, but two months later they were back in place.

This time the bed would come away from the frame, but there were still a lot of friction. The basic block pulleys we were using did not have ball-bearings. 

So we upgraded to racing yacht, nylon sheave, ball bearing blocks. They looked beautiful and rolled beautifully when there was no load.

Once connected to the dynamic climbing rope however the bed struggled to go up or down. Hardly the Rolls Royce action I was hoping for. 

So I changed the rope to high quality, static rope. This produced a small improvement but there was still too much friction. 

We substituted rope for cable, or wire rope. At only 3 mm thick, it didn’t look the way I had wanted the bed to but it may help with the friction problem. It was also able to take 2000 kilograms of load. 

Was this was the Eureka moment I had been waiting for? 

Up to this point we had been using builders’ buckets filled with sand for the counterweights. The problem with this was that sand is not very heavy, so you need a lot of it, and this takes up lots of space. This means the buckets will touch the ground before the bed is fully upright. 

So I bought some beautiful chrome dumbbells and with some modifications was able to make a column of weight. 

By this stage Ray had come on board. Ray is a former business angel, who has a love of innovative ideas. His passion is for Do Something Different a project he set up with others a few years back, The Idea, as I understand it, is to free your mind of redundant and perhaps destructive habits by consciously trying out different approaches, whether in a small or big way. I guess this project of mine might be an example of that kind of thinking. He would come out each Wednesday afternoon on a fortnightly basis and help out practically. More importantly, from my point of view he would inspire me to keep going with this project and to believe that it might would one day bear fruit. 

On the first afternoon that Ray visited, we replaced the rope with cable. Unfortunately I hadn’t secure the cable onto the left hand cam very well. Within a few minutes of rigging up the system, there was a resounding thud as 25 kilos of gleaming chrome weights smashed down into the foot of the bed frame, splitting the wood in the process. 

Not that kind of competent professional image I had wanted to convey. I set about refastening the cable. We tested it again. 

Compared to rope the cable version was light as a feather, but it was still not that great. And then….. Kerchung!! 

The right hand weight stack came thundering down. I expected Ray to be in the car park by now but he seemed unfazed, saying something about the positive effect of mistakes on the development of an idea. 

But it was quite late and he did have to go home. I too had to leave the project to get on with my paid work but before he came back the following fortnight I had reattached the cable. 

By this stage I had left my expectations behind. If it worked, so be it, but most likely there would be another unforeseen problem. So let’s see. 

It did work, but not to the point of dancing around the estate. Most people had given up on the possibility of it ever working. It was just Charlie’s folly and he should be getting on with “real work” and not be wasting his time and money on this. 

Nevertheless, by the time Ray arrived the next day, it was functioning. We moved it up and down a lot and while it was a bit creaky and the whole frame moved a lot, it did work. It bloody worked!! 

Then the nylon sheaves in the blocks started groaning. One of them split open and disgorged its nylon balls. It appeared that they were incompatible with the cable and would only work with rope. Oh, dear!

I then ordered a set of high spec metal sheave blocks. They could handle 1000 kilograms, but they didn’t have ball bearings. Unfortunately the combined friction of ten pulleys was roughly equivalent to using rope. 

No movement up or down. The company that supplied them thankfully took them back without quibbling. It was another delay while I sourced something more suitable. I couldn’t find anything online, but eventually got lucky with a ship’s chandlers outlet. They could supply ball bearing blocks with metal sheaves. 

The next area in need of improvement was the bottom pulley which sits below the cam. A fixed pulley assembly is the most compact and effective mechanism for this role. The one’s available however were expensive and not quite the right shape or size for the job. 

So it was back to Chris Wallace again. I cut out and drilled some old scrap metal from Andy’s shop and he welded them together. The fixed pulley was screwed through the frame into the concrete floor of the workshop. Crude but effective. These have now been superseded by some custom made stainless steel ones made by CPE.

The combination of all these improvements resulted in the smooth gravity, defying movement that we have today. 

My ambition when I began this project was to produce something beautiful and well crafted. I wanted the mechanism and the wonders of engineering to be seen in action. I wanted it to be both functional and fun. This is what inspired me to keep going. 

So here we are. We have a working bed. I’ve loaded it up with climbing holds and it’s looking good. And, it works beautifully. 

The next phase is developing 3D computer models of crafted wooden beds with other themes. The themes will include: weight training, cycling, art/sculptural, and meditation.

Matt Ball the ace climber and creative engineer who modelled for the video has developed some of these models.

I am grateful to him and to all the other people who have contributed to this awesome project.

R.I.P:

Chris Wallace 1935 -2006

Roger Eatherton 1944 - 2020