Thread: Caravan dinette - under table leaves, advice needed please

Gayle, The enlarged top and fillers is the same concept as my enlarged top and spacers from my first reply, so I support the concept so long as you have the room to slide into the seats. Have experience with some 16ft vans with a front double convertible and mid kitchen, where the fridge cabinet comes out from the wall beside the convertible, and getting an adult in the gap with a standard sized table could be a chore. If you have the room to do so go for it.

The rotating table option builds like a sandwich. You have a base structure which connects to the van front wall and support leg and is sized to fit into the gap between the seats in bed mode. You have a dressier retangular table top with largish radius on the corners for clearance as the working table top. This is narrow enough to fill the gap between the benches to provide a level surface in bed mode. The meat in the sandwich is the lazy susan turntable in the middle connecting both and allowing the top to rotate relative to the base.

I suspect that since you are working with a single bed dinette, the table is close to square and you cannot see much advantage in the system. I can see it being usefull with a larger dinette where the table is longer and by rotating the table the greater length converts to greater width by rotating, bringing the meal closer to the diners, at the expense of reducing the effective seating capacity by converting a 2 each side arrangement to a 1 each end arrangement. Probably no advantage with a single dinette though.

The concept you sketched out of adding wings would be fine but the hardware is not readily available and is difficult to make from scratch with tubes etc. Tubes are supplied in standard sized external dimensions and standard wall thicknesses, and it is extremely rare to find a viable sliding fit situation where one tube will slide into another without a lot of play to make the fitup non viable. Another complication is the hardware obstructing legs when sliding into/out of the seats.

Hope this helps