New creaks, pops, cracks, and squeaks are the last thing I want to hear while road testing a new addition to Gidget. We’re still early on in the conversion so any new noise we introduce is pretty noticeable and infuriating. When we added the bed a couple weeks back we wrote:

We are happy with how it turned out except when driving. Every little bump in the road results in a squeak. It kind of sounds like the metal is flexing where the wood attaches. Maybe we should have put something like felt in between the metal walls and the 2×6 wood? Or maybe we need to take some of the load off of the van walls with a support in the middle of the platform? We’re going to do some experiments to see if we can get the noise down.

After driving it around for a couple of weeks the squeaks reduced somewhat as everything settled but it was still pretty loud. After much debate we stopped being lazy and decided to disassemble the bed and do something about the noise.

We purchased felt (35% wool/65% rayon) from the local fabric store and attached it to the backside of the 2×6 bed rails. Now instead of wood on metal contact there is a thin layer of felt between the wood and metal.

Now there are no SQUEAKS!!! We have learned our lesson, there should not be direct contact between wood and the van metal.

Gidget’s bed was awesome, except when driving around as it squeaked a lot📢. We removed the bed, added felt between the wood and metal, and then put it all back together. Now it’s quiet! 😎

A video posted by Matthew and Tricia Morey (@moreysintransit) on Jul 3, 2016 at 5:17pm PDT

Rough cutting strips of felt on the back side of the 2x6s.

Cutting felt to the exact size.

Gluing the felt to the 2×6 with 3M 90 adhesive spray.