Niva Resource: Fold the seats into a bed

Fold the seats into a bed.

With relatively simple modifications the Niva's seats can be made to convert into a bed when needed.

Front: Remove the head-rests (if you have fixed head-rests see below ofr the fold-foward method), and adjust the top halves of the seats backwards until they are level with the bottom of the rear seat.

Rear: The hinges between the top and bottom halves of the rear seat need to be modified:

Here's the instructions how to do it by bending the hinges from Russian. The translation is pretty poor sorry, but the images are enough to show you how to bend the hinges.

However, I found the hinge bending method did not allow the top part of the seat to move rearwards enough into the rear. So I simply dismantled the 2 hinges between the top and bottom parts of the seat, and added about 50mm of leather strapping between the 2 halves of the hinges. This has worked very well, and remarkably the seat still remains reasonably stable when in position as a seat (or at least as ridgid as the flimsy original set-up).

Other people's Niva beds

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Fold the seats into a bed

Niva seats folded into a bed

Niva bed

With fixed head-rest seats

Alternatively if your front seat's head-rests do not come off, you can adjust and tilt the front seats as far foward as they can go, and modify the rear seats to be able to fill the gap beteen the rear and front seats. You will need a mattress with this method though: