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I have to find something different than the stacked foam in the v-berth. 6 months in and it's not working for tracy's back. does anyone have any suggestions? I know you can get custom-made mattresses but i understand they are damned expensive. i'm even thinking of getting a regular mattress and cutting it to fit myself -just wire and stuffing and foam covered in cloth. can't be too hard. has anyone tried this?
If there isn't enough give in the foam what will happen is the l spine won't be aligned properly, particularly when lying on the side. Look at the ads for matresses to see this illustrated. From what I've read the foam of your v-berth cusions are old and hard, topped by egg-crate foam which may be too soft, and then memory foam which can't work properly because of the first two.
I'd start with at least 6" of medium density foam topped with at least 2" of memory foam. They memory foam should have as little on top of it as possible or it won't work. I found this out when my wife put a thick matress pad on top of our Tempur-Pedic. It made it as hard as a rock and miserable to try to sleep on.
The cushions in my boat appeared hardly used. I trimmed and added 3" of memory foam (the power knife is absolutely the way to go). That wasn't enough. I picked up another 3" pad and put a bedspread between them to prevent bunching and allow them to breath. Still not quite right. Added a old blanket underneath with one of those emergency thermal foils between the cushions and the blanket. Finally covered the whole thing with a fitted mattress pad. Perfect! The only problem is getting out of the darn thing,
1st. You don't want to.
2nd. You sink so far into it, you have to crawl on your belly to get out. Now I need grab rails on the overhead.
Back pain is gone. I think the pain was caused by two things, lack of comfort in the mattress and thermal draw through the hull, cause even with the mattress fixed, the pain didn't stop until I installed the thermal barrier.
I've missed this thread completely , had I seen it I wouldn't have bothered starting another. Tch tch.
However, Yofy's point about remaking the v-berth mattress from two pieces without that silly filler bit is on the money. I did this with PB and it worked a treat.
I finally went and bought a 4" foam pad for my v-berth at Walmart. It is a combination of 2 1/2" regular foam + 1 1/2" memory foam. I used a freshly sharpened regular kitchen knife to trim/saw it to size (worked great) using the original berth cushions as pattern and then folded and pinned the mattress cover underneath (rather than cutting and resewing it). Holy Smokes what an amazing sleep difference. It is firm but with a bit of give, no more bunching up problems like I had with thin egg crate foam mattress pads.
I left it as one piece to avoid eventually sinking through the middle seam, so getting at the compartments underneath is not as easy, but it is still possible (I only store seasonal clothes in there anyhow so not much call for getting in them regularly)...and the sheets stay basically in place while lifting the whole thing at once.
We rebuilt our vee-berth with 4 inches of marine closed cell foam (like they put in cockpit cushions), then two inches of egg crate foam, with the egg crate upside down. Feels like an expensive store-bought mattress.
Just ordered the Froli spring system an going to add 2" egg crate to the 4" matteress, hope it results in better sleep and a dryer matteress
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