Van Hack Rear-Facing Bench in Ford Transit

We hope this video inspires you to #SeekOutTheAdventure in your life…no matter where you are and what you are doing.

Welcome to another seek out adventure video where you will be inspired to live an unusual and exciting life today we’re going to talk about the fan in particular the benches inside the van i’ve had a lot of people ask me how do you make the first row rear-facing it’s a simple semi reversible modification all right here’s a standard configuration we got the two

Benches with the queen-size bed in the back and what we’re gonna do is take this bench and put it up against these two captain’s chairs and the passengers will be rear-facing one of the biggest considerations when making this bench flip around to be rear-facing is the mounting options so there’s three legs to this bench and if you flip it backwards the outside

Legs they line up perfectly it does shift the bench over a teeny bit the middle leg is not centered and so when you flip it backwards it doesn’t line up with the the mounting brackets so the first modification once you pull this bench out is to take off that middle leg i’ve also seen some people they’ve been a little confused on how to take the seats out because

They might be missing the pole handles this is the mechanism that will lock it into place and what i’ve done because i don’t have the pull handles is i’ve done a zip tie around this nose and then a pull zip tie right here and that allows me to just pull it up and down really simple so this is the the leg for the middle of the bench like i said it doesn’t line up

With the the mounting brackets once you flip it around to be rear-facing so i just unbolted it off three easy bolts to take off with that it just leaves me with two legs on this bench now the question is how does that affect the structural integrity of the bench i don’t know it’s built like a tank it’s a beast so i’m willing to take that chance we are definitely

Doing something against the manufacturers recommendations so proceed with caution the other modification after removing this middle leg is you need to make a little bit of room on the front section of these mounting holes for all of this hardware to hit it used to be like that but i had to cut out these notches right here and right here to make it so that this

Little section could fit past here so when i said that it’s a a semi reversible modification this is the semi section because you can put the leg back on you can flip this back over whenever you want but you’re always going to have this little notch that you cut out so once you have the middle leg off and these notches cut out you just put it back in line up the

Two outside legs with the outside mounting brackets and it sits in fine like that what you’ll have to consider after this is that the bench is now shifted over just a bit this way so this is like perfectly in line with the edge of the floor and then you do have a bit of a gap here it’s a nice open space for us when we’re camping this is an amazing setup it acts

As a changing room a living room we also take this pad and unfold it and span this gap and it makes another bed all right so now that you have it all set up it’s all comfortable for the people in the back the question is what does it mean for the people in the front because now that you have the bench up against the captain chairs you’re gonna have limited ability

To move them forward move them backwards and also recline them i have this to push back as far as i can with like a decent recline sit up position and i only have a few inches from my knees to the dashboard so depending on how tall you are this might not give you a lot of room for long drives especially if you want to sleep you can’t really recline this i’m about

510 and so this is kind of how i sit if i want to recline a little bit i’d have to scoot it forward then i could you barely get a recline so there is some sacrifices especially for the passenger i’m not too worried about the reclining aspect for the driver because you’re never really reclining so again i’m about 5-10 and for me this is like the perfect forward

Frontward position i got it at the angle that i want it if you’re taller than me you’d still have a bit more legroom so overall it’s good the biggest benefit of this configuration for our family of eight is that it allows the kids to look at each other play with each other as we run long road trips but it also allows us to create a second bed what we did was we

Bought a petzl zero crash pad and it is almost the perfect size to fill this whole area and it’s a quick simple just pulling out unfold it and you got an instant bed there you go instant bed right there it’s a little little saggy in the middle so if you want you can shove some bags or something there but and then for somebody that’s 510 it is it’s short for my

Feet but it’s okay that’s why i have the queen-size bed for us big kids and the little kids can lay down in here so there you have it that’s how we turn this bench to be rear-facing to allow for a more entertaining transport and to provide a secondary bed for our big family if you got any questions leave them in the comments below i do understand there are some

Inherent risks involved with this type of modification i’m well aware of them if you want to share them in the comments below feel free but you’re kind of preaching to the choir because we’ve already done the research obviously manufacturers like ford are not going to sign off on this they haven’t done any tests associated with how this configuration will perform

In certain types of crashes so with that they’re just always going to say we recommend don’t doing it because they can’t even tell you what might happen if you get in a crash with it other than that we really enjoy it the kids love it and for camping it just makes it so much more of a breeze because now we have two beds instead of just one

Transcribed from video
Van Hack • Rear-Facing Bench in Ford Transit By Seek Out The Adventure