Archives August 2025

I’m going to get you a little bit closer. Why? Because I’m a nice dad. No, you’re not. I’m not? That’s not very nice to say. Why am I not a nice dad? You’re a good dad. I am a good dad. No. No. Hug right here. All right, fine. Get out, you hooligan. Out. Out. Out. He’s telling you to get out. Bye, girls. Love you. Yep. Have a good day. Be good. Bye. Bye, Dad. Bye, kid. Here. Howdy, folks. Ed here. Welcome back to Bono’s Garage. Today, we’re trying something different. I’m going to call it Bullno’s Garage on the road. You guys have to let me know if you like this format or not. It’s something new. Basically, it’s just going to be me off the top of my head, driving on the way to work. During the summer, I’m sure you guys have noticed that I just don’t drop videos. I’ve said it before; I may sound like a broken record, but I just don’t have any time with the kids, family obligations, work, and everything else going on during the summer. There’s just no time to produce and film videos. I don’t have a lot of time, even in the evenings, but what I do have is a 20-minute commute to work. So, I think I’m going to try this little thing where you and I just sit in my truck on my way to work and talk. It’s not really a conversation because you’re not talking back to me, but it’s kind of like a podcast type thing, except it’s mostly just a YouTube version of that. Let me know if you like this because if you do, if you find it entertaining, then I’ll keep doing it. If you don’t, then I won’t. I have no problem not doing something if you guys aren’t interested in it. It’s just going to be talking about things like bullnose-related stuff, garage-related stuff, automotive-related stuff, and it’s just off the top of my head about what I find interesting or what I’ve worked on lately. I’m still working on stuff even though I’m not doing a lot of videos during the summer. I don’t have a lot of time, but at night after the kids go to bed, I can tinker in the garage a little bit or work on some things. I try not to work on the trucks too much without you guys there. I’ve done quite a bit of work on the Bronco and got it running. I have an interesting story about that too, which I’ll get to at some point. I’m not going to work on the F-150 without doing videos on it, but I also work on all the other garage-related stuff. For instance, I’m trying to teach myself how to weld. I’ve always found welding fascinating. How cool is it to stick two pieces of metal together with fire? That’s pretty neat. But I’ve never really gotten into it; I’ve never had the chance. It’s super useful. The number of times in my life that I’ve thought, “Man, I’d really like to get these two pieces of metal together” is way too high. So, I figured, you know what, I’ll learn how to weld. There’s a local place that has classes, but I don’t have time for that. YouTube is a thing, and welders are fairly affordable for the most part now. I thought, let’s go out and get myself a welder and give that a try to see if I can teach myself how to weld. I know I’m going to miss some things, and teaching myself is going to handicap me a little bit from the beginning because there are things that a pro or even a teacher would know that they could tell me right up front. I may teach myself bad habits and all that kind of stuff, and I understand that. But it’s something I want to teach myself and get into anyway. Ultimately, the goal is to hopefully get good enough to weld body panels. The Bronco has a little bit of rust right now. For the Northeast or near the coast, it’s not hardly any rust at all, but for down here, it’s actually quite a bit. There are a couple of places where there are holes in the body panels that are completely rusted through. I’d like to learn how to cut out a piece, weld in a replacement, grind it flat, and make it look nice so that you could paint it and not even know it was done. I don’t know that I’ll ever get that good, but that’s a goal. I do feel like I can at least get good enough to potentially weld a mount for a seat. I’ve got a back seat from a 2005 F250. It’s a rear seat with nice fold-down cup holders in the middle, and I want to put that in the F-150. Of course, those seats are not going to fit. They’ll fit dimensionally, but the mount points aren’t the same. So, I’m going to have to fabricate something. I want to get good enough to the point where I could at least fabricate that and feel confident in the welds I do so that I’m not going to go flying out of the vehicle at 70 mph with the seat attached to me because it’s no longer attached to the truck. Hopefully, I can get to that point. I’m not there yet, but welding is an art. Respect to you guys that do it because it looks easy. These guys on YouTube make welding look super easy. They just get out the gun, set the machine, strike an arc, and do some stuff, and then it makes a stack of dimes, right? But it’s nowhere near that easy to do. Look, it’s fairly easy to use a welder to get a couple of pieces of metal to stick together strong enough that if you bang it with a hammer, it’s not going to come apart. That’s not that hard. But making them look good and be truly structurally sound so that they can work in an application is a different story. I hope to get there. You can set yourself up for failure right from the beginning if you don’t get your spool speed correct, your wire feed speed, or your power levels. You need to use the right diameter of wire. You have to know how thick the metal is that you’re working on and what kind of metal it is. You have to make sure the metal’s clean. You need to have the right equipment. I went out and got myself a Captain MP205. This is not an advertisement for them. They have advertisements all over YouTube for this thing, but I’m not advertising for them. I thought about reaching out to them to see if they would give me one for free, but I’m just going to pay for my own stuff every now and then anyway. That way, I can talk to you guys about it without having to worry about some corporate sponsor. So far, so good. It seems to work pretty well. It’s a little expensive, but it does all the stuff right. It does MIG and TIG, pulse MIG, pulse TIG, and it even has a plasma cutter, which is cool. I’ve never plasma cut anything before in my entire life. That’s actually a lot harder than you’d think it would be, too. I tried plasma cutting, and I’m wiggling all over the place. The plasma cutter is like a lightsaber; it has no resistance whatsoever. It’s just a plasma arc slicing through metal like a hot knife through butter. It’s awesome, but it’s actually pretty hard to be straight. It makes a mess if you don’t have the settings right. I’ve found that using a cutoff wheel is better than the plasma cutter for me because it’s quicker to set up, and it cuts straighter, leaving cleaner lines. The plasma is undeniably cool, but I’m not great at it, so I’m wandering all over the place. Anyway, it’s got all that stuff, and I’m teaching myself with flux MIG for now because buying a bottle of gas, 75/25, is a whole thing. They’re expensive. You can get a bottle of gas for MIG on Amazon for 300 bucks, and it’s full. The problem is that I don’t even know if a place around here will fill it. What’s that about? It’s a legal bottle; it holds gas and has all the stamps and markings. It’s been tested and everything. It should be fine, but I guess some places won’t do it unless you buy their bottle because they want to make the money. To be fair, I haven’t checked with any place around here whether they will refill a bottle from Amazon. I have an 8 to 5 job, and all these places are open from 8 to 5, so I can’t just pop out of work and go down to the welding shop to ask about a bottle. I may have to take a day off one of these days to run some errands and make that one of my stops. Anyway, I’m teaching myself with flux, and it’s not bad. There’s a lot of spatter, but I feel like I’m doing pretty good. I’m building a welding table, which is the first thing you build when you’re learning to weld. I got some old angle iron from my father-in-law and found a couple of guys selling some old angle on Facebook Marketplace. The top is going to be an old industrial shelf, 4×2, that I just had laying around. I just tossed it together, and the angle is actually pretty nice. If you’re from the Southwest or some of the drier places, you know that a lot of less advantaged people will use what’s called a swamp cooler instead of an air conditioning unit. Swamp coolers suck, but they’re better than nothing, especially when it’s 100 degrees outside. Basically, you run some water over an element, and a big fan blows the humidity into your house, helping to keep the air a little cooler. They put these on top of roofs, and to get them up there, you need some kind of scaffold or mount. A lot of guys make those mounts out of angle; they just weld some angle together and plop it on top of a roof to hold the swamp cooler. Many of those are just hanging out in salvage yards around here. My father-in-law had a couple of those laying around, so I got those from him, cut the pieces off, cleaned them up, welded them together, and now I have the beginnings of a welding table. But like I said, I’m using a cutoff wheel. I bought a big cutoff wheel for my chop saw. I know you’re not supposed to use a chop saw. for cutting metal like that. It’s not really designed for that, but it works. It makes nice straight cuts, which is important when you’re building a table because you don’t want it to be wobbly, right? So, I got the table and I put some casters on it, and I’m working to put it together. But man, welding is an art. I feel like I’m not doing too bad. I’m definitely not stacking dimes, but I’m trying to learn how to see the puddle and how to manipulate it, and what pattern I like the best. There’s a lot of muscle memory involved. You have to know what angle to be at and your stick out, and how far away you are. I find myself wandering away as I’m going down the line, and that’s a problem. You have to keep the angle right. There’s a lot of stuff that you don’t think about, and you shouldn’t have to think about it if you’re a good welder. You just do it, and it comes naturally to you. I’m just waiting to get to that point. But like I said, I may never get to the point where I can do body work. I may end up trying TIG one of these days to see if that’ll be better for body work. But again, I want to get at least decent with the fundamentals of MIG before I do that stuff. Anyway, it’s fun though. I enjoy it. I look forward to doing it, but it’s a process. I got this MP 205, and it’s like an $800 machine, which I had to save up to get. But then you can’t just buy the machine; you’ve got to have all the stuff. You need a helmet because, god forbid, you don’t have an auto-darkening helmet. You may as well just throw in the towel. So, you have to get one of those. They’re not super expensive, but the stuff adds up. You need gloves, and a welding jacket or shirt to keep yourself from getting burned. You have to have the wire and the consumables, a cart, and a table. I’m building my own, but you still have to get the materials for that because not all the materials I have are from the junk pile. You need some stuff to stitch things together. It gets expensive, but I’m having a good time. I have a whole wish list full of things on Amazon to try to make my life better when it comes to welding. Who knows, it may be the flavor of the month for me. One of the issues I have in my life is that I get excited about something and I’m all in for a few weeks or a couple of months, or maybe even a year, depending on what it is, and then I just lose interest and move on to something else. So, we’ll see if welding is that thing for me. Luckily, the YouTube thing and the F-150 thing have stayed pretty well cemented. I’m keeping myself from playing video games at night because if I do, I’ll get sucked in and then I won’t make videos or do anything else in my spare time, which I don’t have much of. I’m teaching myself, and I’ll show you guys the welding table once it’s done. I’m pretty happy with it. I have some cool features planned, like a vice mount that rotates and some other neat stuff. I want to add my own touch and make it neat. Hopefully, one day I’ll be able to do the Bronco thing and weld some body panels together. Now, I look around and every piece of metal I see is an opportunity. I can build something out of that. I’m planning to build an engine stand, a run stand, with all the gauges, fuel tank, and radiator mount because those are expensive too. If I can build my own, that’s a win. But that’s one of those practical applications where you have to ensure you have good solid welds because, god forbid, the engine flops off while it’s running. It’s a learning experience, and I’m kind of a scatterbrain. I constantly set tools down and forget where I put them. I spend half of my time looking for tools, and I know I do that, but I still do it. I’m especially scatterbrained when it comes to something I’m not familiar with or new at. I was cutting some angle irons for this welding table and dropped a piece of angle iron right on top of a brand new set of Basset racing wheels. I think it’s Basset; I always mix it up with Barrett. I found a set of really nice painted red wagon wheels for the Bronco because I like that classic look. I was looking for a set, and some guy had them for sale on Facebook. I thought, “That’s perfect,” and he advertised them as five on five and a half. I brought them home and tried to put my hub on them, but the holes didn’t line up. I measured, and it’s five on four and a half. That’s on me for not checking it, right? So, I didn’t check it, and now I have these wheels I need to sell. In the midst of trying to sell these wheels, I found someone on Facebook selling Basset racing wheels, and I really like the look of those. I need a different lug nut for those since they’re racing wheels, but that’s okay; I’ll figure it out. I went out and got those, had them in my garage, and dropped a piece of angle iron. It hit the back of one of the wheels right where the bead seat is and left a divot. I believe the divot is big enough that it might cause a tire not to seat and hold air. However, they are steel wheels, and I’m learning how to weld, so I might be able to fix it by welding. I might try pulse welding for that because I think it will be better at controlling the heat and not blowing through. But I’ve never done pulse welding before, so I’ll need to test that on a piece of scrap angle first. It’s interesting that learning how to weld caused me to drop something onto a wheel that I can now fix by welding, now that I kind of know how to do it. We’ll see. By the way, these Basset racing wheels aren’t street legal. The ones I got aren’t even marked, so that’s another thing we’ll have to contend with. I will probably talk about that in another episode because I’m pulling into my parking lot as we speak. So, like I said, let me know if you like this format. It’s just me sitting in a truck talking, but it’s what I have time to do. It’s easy for me to edit these and get them out to you quickly. If you like this, I will keep doing it. I have all kinds of topics I could ramble about. I like to talk; I can hear myself talk. Anyway, thanks again so much for watching, guys. We’ll see you next time. She’s rough around the edges, but she’s doing fine. Getting things to shine at Moon Knows Garage. She’s considered divine. Thanks again for watching. We’ll see you next time.