Category Bullnose Garage

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Expensive garage floor epoxy coatings, are they worth it? Well, let’s talk about it.

The garage floor coating that you see right down here is from a company called Armor Epoxy. It’s a two-part, 100% solids garage floor epoxy coating, and it wasn’t cheap. So the question is, do I think it was worth it? Well, let’s talk about that.

When you decide to coat your garage floor, you’ve got a lot of different options. I mean, of course, you could not coat it at all. If you’re a commercial garage or you have a lot of vehicles coming in and out, or if you have a lot of square footage, coating it with something may be impractical or too expensive. You know, you’re going to drip a lot of oil and gas and other kinds of chemicals and stuff on there. You may just go ahead and leave it with the regular concrete floors. Nothing wrong with that.

But because my garage is a residential garage and the value of the house is somewhat impacted by the shape of the garage, I wanted to make sure that I put down something, some kind of coating. So my options were basically for paint, which is what was on here before, but it doesn’t hold up really well and it doesn’t look real great. So I don’t think I wanted floor paint. I didn’t want to have to paint it every two or three years and have it come up when I drove over it and these tire marks and that kind of stuff.

You can do epoxy, but there’s lots of different grades of epoxy. There’s the stuff that you can go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and get. It comes in a couple of cans with a kit to do a garage this size, probably 150 bucks. It comes with a little bag of flakes. You know, you could certainly do one of those. I’ve got a little bit of experience with that kind of a product. I’ve done a couple of projects with that in the past. It works okay, but the two projects that I’ve done didn’t really last very long. I got a couple of years out of them.

The one was sort of a back patio that was covered, so it wasn’t directly in the sunlight, but after two or three years, you started to see wear tracks in the coating from where people would come in and out of the back door, and it just started to sort of peel and flake right there. The other application was a garage with a vehicle that was simply parked. There was no work done in the garage at all. It just held the vehicle and some boxes. It’s held up better, but still after a few years, there’s some spots where it’s starting to peel.

So I didn’t want to have to come back and redo this floor every few years. I’m going to be doing an engine rebuild in here, doing my own oil changes, that kind of stuff. There’s no way that I’m not going to get chemicals and solvents on this floor, so I wanted something that was a little more durable than that.

And then once you get into the next level of things, you’re talking about do you do 100% solids epoxy? Are you going to do a polyaspartic polyurea? There’s all kinds of different options, and it really, it’s hard to do the research. I’m not gonna bore you with all that, but what I am gonna say is that I chose Armor Epoxy. It’s a 100% solids epoxy. It’s a kit that I got. It comes with the primer, but the kit that I got comes with epoxy primer, the two-part racing blue epoxy that you see here, the flakes it came with. I sprung extra for the military-grade top coat, and it also came with the installation kit, so you got a roller. Oh, you got the roller covers. You have to go out and buy your own roller, some mixing. You’re supposed to get some mixing buckets. I didn’t. That’s a story in two of itself, but generally, it comes with most of what you need.

I had to go out and buy spike shoes to throw the flakes down and a couple of other little things that you’re going to want to get that don’t come with the kit. So what I’m going to do is I’ve got some video of me before the floor went down talking about what I had to do to prep the garage for the floor because prep work is a big part. You have to make sure that you prep the floor correctly for else it won’t stick right and you’ll have bubbling or delamination, all kinds of trouble.

So I’ll talk a little bit about that. I’ll also have some garage security cam footage of me actually putting the floor down with my father-in-law, and you can kind of see what I went through and how it all went. Now unfortunately, I didn’t get the last day of me putting down the top coat. It’s kind of boring anyway. It’s just a clear coat. You can’t really even see what I was doing, but I lost that camera footage, so I don’t have that.

One thing I do want to note before you say anything is that I did wear a respirator on the last day. It took me two days to learn that lesson, and the primer was really, really bad in terms of the fumes. The actual epoxy, the two-part epoxy itself wasn’t bad at all, and then the top coat was probably the worst in terms of how bad the fumes were, but that was the day that I was wearing a respirator, so that was a good idea.

All right, so without further ado, take it away, past Ed.

In my garage right now, there’s not a whole lot to see, really. It’s kind of bare before the floor goes in. So I haven’t even really started my channel yet. This is kind of a pre-channel video, I guess. But I’m putting down Armor Epoxy this weekend. It’s Labor Day weekend 2020, and I don’t see a whole lot of reviews or a whole lot of videos online for the Armor Epoxy product. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, seen a lot of good things on like garagejournal.com and a few other places. So I want my garage floor to sort of stand up to, you know, doing an engine swap and gas and oil and all that fun stuff, so I decided to go ahead and, you know, drop the money on a real hardcore product. You know, I got the primer and I got the military-grade top coat and the whole bit, so we’re doing that this weekend. So when I’m done, I’ll come back and let you guys know how it went.

Right now, I’m gonna talk a little bit about the procedure that I did with the floor that I have to get it ready for this. Hopefully, hopefully it’s enough. They say that preparation is like 90% or something, so hopefully that’s true because I can prepare. I can’t paint very well, but I can prepare, so we’ll see how it goes.

All right guys, so let’s talk a little bit about what I had to do to this floor to get it ready for Armor Epoxy this weekend. As you can see now, the floor is really nice and clean and bare and ready, and it wasn’t that way, of course, when we bought the house a few years ago. There was a sort of bluish-gray paint on the floor, and I’m sure that garage floor paint is fine for most applications, but I really wanted something a little bit more durable than garage floor paint, something that could hold up to, you know, oil and gas and that kind of stuff, so I wanted epoxy.

Well, in order for epoxy to stick to a floor, it’s got to be nice and clean like this, so you got to get rid of the paint. And you got a few options. You can use chemicals and nasty stuff to try to get it up, or you can get that done on all fours with a hand sander, or you can go out and rent a tool. And what I did was I went out to Home Depot and I rented a floor buffer with an attachment, what’s called a Dima brush, and went and buffed the entire floor with the diamond brush. And you can see that, you know, it got up all the paint, and it took me all day long. It’s no joke. Morning to dusk, all day. It was one of the messiest things I’ve ever done in my entire life. There was dust everywhere. Dust went all throughout the house. There was a huge cloud of dust coming out my garage door. Please guys, if you’re gonna do this, wear a mask. You know, I’m not always the safest person, but I definitely wore a mask that day and probably saved my lungs. Wear ear plugs because it’s gross and nasty. Wear hearing protection for sure because it’s loud. Look, if you’ve got a hazmat Tyvek suit, put that on. It’s crazy.

All right, so but it did a good job. I got all the paint up, and one of the things that I had to do was I had to fill in these cracks. So I got my angle grinder with a diamond cut-off wheel for masonry, and I went through and chased all these cracks and opened them up a little bit so that I could fill them in with a product I found called PC Concrete. And PC Concrete is a two-part epoxy that is claimed to be stronger than concrete, and I believe it because if you look over here, I actually have a crack that’s forming right here, and that crack wasn’t there before, right? It’s actually new, but it’s in the concrete and not in the PC Concrete. So I do believe that that stuff is stronger than concrete.

But, you know, it’s okay. I mean, concrete cracks. It is what it is. But it works out real well, which I had to fill it in twice because the first application, everything would seep into the cracks, and so it would go just a little bit lower than flush, and then I had to fill it in again. And then once it was higher than flush, I could grind it off with a diamond grinding wheel, so that worked out good.

And here we are now. You can see a few splotchy places. What those are are some divots and low spots. Like, so for example, there was a couple of places where leaves had fallen onto the concrete when they poured the slab, and then, of course, they left the leaf impressions, which are pretty, but not what I wanted my garage for. So I went ahead and ground those out, filled them in with the same stuff, PC Concrete. Now it’s a much thicker application, which is why they’re darker colored, but I was able to get that done.

One thing to note, if you’re using a product like that and you’re using great big globs of it, is that when you’re using big globs and you’re kind of grinding them down with a diamond grinder, it tends to melt rather than grind, so you have to just be careful of your temperature and do just little bits at a time or else, yeah, it also melts and gets all nasty.

So once I got the floor kind of all cleaned up and ready to go, there was one still large issue that I had to contend with. Now you see this wall over here? That’s the wall that connects the garage to the house. Originally, they had just plopped this garage right up next to the house. This was not an original garage; they added it. And down here in the Southwest, of course, all the houses are stucco. And so rather than, you know, bother to tear down the stucco, they just plopped the garage right on top of the stucco. So there was actually a layer of drywall, then there was stucco, then there was drywall, and then there was the garage. And the stucco goes actually down to the ground level, so this slab also wasn’t original. So when they poured this slab, they poured it right up against the house, and so they poured it right up against the stucco. So when I took the stucco out, there was a huge gap over here between the slab and the house foundation, and so it was probably right about like maybe like right here all the way in.

And so what I had to do was take all the stucco out from down there and fill that in. And so what I did, sorry for that, was up against the house, I put neoprene. So this is just neoprene back here. It’s a sheet of neoprene. It’s like, oh, was it 3/16 maybe, up against the foundation of the house to give me like a little expansion joint between this concrete and the house foundation. And then I just got the regular stuff, the Quikrete stuff from Lowe’s, mixed it up, and then poured it in all the way up and down here, all the way along, just poured that in, and then I tried to grind it as flush as I could. I’m not that great at it because I’m not really a contractor or a concrete guy, so I also used some leveling concrete to try to get things smoothed out over here, and then, of course, that didn’t work super great, so I ended up using PC Concrete in a few places to try to get that nice and flush and level.

And then I got to the point where I was like, it’ll be all right, and that’s where I am now because there are a few places still in here that aren’t perfect, but I think by the time I get a thick layer of epoxy down and then get my flakes thrown up in the air and raining down on it, I don’t think you’ll be able to tell.

And I should say that when I did all this, none of these walls were here, so none of the new walls were up. And when the new walls went up, of course, you’re working with drywall, you make a lot of dust, and so all that dust settled onto my nice clean floor, and drywall dust gets into everything, and you can’t really get it out. So what I ended up having to do was rent my grinding or my floor buffer again, and this time I got some 60 grit sanding discs, and I wet sanded the entire floor. You know, I had mopped it three or four times, and I just kept coming up with more gunk, so rather than, you know, keep trying to do that and sailing, I figured I’d want to sand it, and sanding should get pretty much everything, and it actually worked pretty good.

So I, yeah, 60 grit wet sanded the whole thing. I had a helper. My dad was here, and he would, you know, slop a bunch of water on the floor, and then I’d come back with the buffer, and then he’d come after me with the shop vac, which soaked up most of the gunk that the slurry that the sander left behind. And then, after that, I mopped it about two more times, and now I think I could probably eat off of it, so it’s about as clean as it’s gonna get. But tomorrow, the day that I’m going to prime, I’m still going to vacuum the entire thing one more time and probably hit it with a Swiffer just to kind of get whatever last vestiges of whatever else that there is, and anything that Swiffer doesn’t get is going to be in the primer, and that’s just the way it’s gonna be.

So, all right, we’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck.

All right guys, here we are. The first coat’s done. It’s the primer. You can see it’s on behind me. It’s probably about 30 minutes old or so. Went on pretty good, actually. As you can see, it’s a little bit wet. Went on a whole lot faster, a little bit easier than I thought it would, so that’s good. I’m pretty impressed with how the whole thing worked out. But I will tell you, no question that this stuff is no joke. After working on it for about an hour, so I was feeling pretty fine because, as you can see, I got, well, let’s see it there, I got that door all closed up there, and then that door all closed up there, and the door that I’m standing in right now was open, but it was closed to the rest of the house because I have a wife and two new babies in there, and I didn’t want them getting all kinds of fumigated in there. So I ended up fumigating myself. I had all my doors closed because I didn’t want anything to blow in from the outside, but a few specks of dust is a small consequence compared to laying on the floor puddle of your own vomit. So word otherwise, working with this stuff, make sure to always properly ventilate.

So right now I’ve got this door, now turn around, you see this door behind me into my office back there is open with a fan blowing out to the outside world, so now we’re pretty good, but I had learned that lesson the hard way.

Okay guys, so here it is dry. Basically, this is about four hours later. As you can see, I am clearly not a painter because, yeah, there’s roller marks and all kinds of stuff in here. Although the documentation for this stuff did clearly say not to worry about marks and splotchiness because the actual epoxy will cover it up, so we shall see just how well it does. Ultimately, this is just a garage floor, so I’m just gonna have to be okay with a little bit of imperfection, which is hard for me, I will admit, but such is life.

Um, so, so, so, so, all right guys, well here we are. Day two, got the color down and the flakes in, and you can kind of take a look behind me and see what you think. It was easier and harder than I expected. I had my father-in-law over here helping me today, so that helped out quite a bit. He did the mixing and laying the epoxy down on the floor and then using the squeegee, and I rolled back, rolled, and used my little spiky shoes to get on there and throw the flakes. The spiky shoes are a pain in the ass. My foot kept slipping out, and so if you’re gonna do this, make sure to tighten them down really well. Test them before you go out and do the epoxy. I didn’t do that, and so I was stuck while the epoxy was kind of trying to dry, trying to get the shoes on my feet and get them all tightened down so they wouldn’t slip off. That was a real pain in the butt. I kept twisting my ankle to the side, which caused my foot to like slip and slide into the epoxy, which I then had to re-roll.

So there’s a few little things, but for the most part, it ended up looking really good. Like, I’m super happy with the color. I’m super happy with how it looks. It’s been about six hours. It’s still a little bit tacky. I’m hoping that it dries enough that I can walk on it and put my clear coat on tomorrow. I have heard that sometimes you get some problems if you don’t mix it well enough that it will never stop being tacky. I’m hoping I don’t have that issue. My father-in-law was the one that did the mixing. He’s usually a pretty thorough guy, so I’m not too worried about it, but I mean, I spent a lot of money, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this garage, so I’m a little bit worried about it. Hopefully, I can sleep tonight, but we’ll come back tomorrow and take a look.

All right guys, here it is finally done. The floor is dry, and I can walk on it. Obviously, I’ve got some other stuff going on here. I’m getting ready to put my baseboards down, and I’ve got a mat for the vehicle so that it leaks a little bit of oil, so I don’t want to get that over my nice new floor when that happens. So I got the mat for that, and still just kind of putting some stuff together, cleaning some things up, but for the most part, I’m pretty happy. Yeah, I think it looks nice. I’m not a great flake thrower, obviously, so take that into account. There’s some splotchiness and weirdness overall with that, but not too bad. Overall, I love the color. I’m real happy with the shine and how it all kind of turned out and how hard the floor is. I’ve got no doubt that it will protect the floor.

There’s a couple of things, so the top coat was really hard to put on because it’s clear, and you can’t see where you’ve been, and you don’t know exactly where it’s gone down, so that was really tough. I was really thorough, tried to make sure that I rolled over every spot at least twice, and I got some weirdness with the top coat. This will be hard to see, I think, on camera. The worst spot is over here. Let me see if I can… You can see it in the reflection of the lights here, so I gotta get down here so you can see. Okay, so if you look here, you can kind of see, let’s see, that how it looks like it’s kind of beaded up right there, and it didn’t actually lay down, especially like right in there. Yeah, I’m not sure what happened there. It’s solid. I mean, you know, there’s no, uh, that’s, it’s not wet or anything. It looks wet, but it’s not.

So, um, no, I don’t know. I’m not a pro at this, so, you know, I’m sure a professional could tell me exactly what I did wrong, but overall, I’m mostly happy. As I’ve said before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, I’m kind of a perfectionist, so it’s hard for me to live with those little kind of imperfections. But as time goes on, I’ll be okay with it.

So, um, anyway, I’ll come back in a little bit once I’ve got all my, uh, the rest of my garage stuff done, once I’ve got the base down and I’ve got my furniture in here and everything, and we’ll talk about the entire Armor Epoxy experience and what I think, what I would have done differently, and overall impressions. Fascinating. Thank you, past Ed.

Okay, so here we are at the end. The floor is down. It’s been a few weeks. I’ve had a chance to walk around on it, drive on it, live with the little bit of strangeness that I got from the top coat. So what do I think? Would I do it again? Yes. It looks phenomenal. Unless you actually get right down there on your hands and knees and look at that top coat, you can’t even tell. Even the flakes that I did a terrible job of throwing down look really good. I mean, in pictures, they look amazing. I’ve gotten a ton of compliments from friends and family that have seen it on pictures, thinking that, you know, it’s done professionally when it was just done by me, who is not a professional. So it can be done by somebody who’s not a pro.

So the breakdown, the good: it is extremely durable. I’ve dropped stuff on it already, not even a mark. It’s easy to clean. I’ve actually got some overspray from doing a spray painting project in here, wiped right up. It’s beautiful. I love the way that it looks. It’s super hard. You can knock on it. You don’t have to, I don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s going to come up. It was very easy to work with the primer and the actual epoxy itself, especially I was worried about whether or not the epoxy was going to set up too quickly, but I left my AC unit on overnight a little bit lower than normal to get the garage floor nice and cool. I had plenty of time to work with both the primer and the actual epoxy itself.

The top coat is part of the bad, but we’ll get into that in a second. What other good is there? I really do feel like it’s going to last a good long time. I feel like I got a good value for my money. It was nice to have the kit and never have everything come with a kit. Another good was the Armor Epoxy customer service, but that came out of a bad. So one of the bads was when I got all the stuff, it didn’t come in the packaging that the website for Armor Epoxy said that it was going to come in. They told me that it was going to come in a couple of buckets that I could use to mix the product, and all it came in was some cardboard boxes. The cans that the product came in were incredibly beat up, and one of them was actually cracked open on the bottom, and it leaked a little bit into the container or the cardboard box that it was in. It wasn’t enough for me to send it back, but it was disappointing.

So I contacted Armor Epoxy and said, hey, you know, guys, for the amount of money that I’m spending on this, eight hundred dollars, I shouldn’t have to worry about this stuff being broken open in shipping, and why did I not get the containers you said I was going to get? And I got to go out and do Lowe’s and buy my own buckets. And so they gave me a little bit of a break, not a lot, but they did make me happy in that regard for customer service, so that’s a good.

Now the bad, again, the way it was shipped and the lack of the buckets. I mean, their website clearly said you’re going to get these buckets and didn’t. Now COVID is going on, so there’s some weird stuff there too, so I can kind of give them a pass on that, but I still put that in the bad column because, I mean, you don’t advertise you’re going to get something and then not send it out, especially for that kind of money.

The other bad is that the top coat is really hard to work with. Now that’s not Armor Epoxy’s fault; it’s just the nature of clear top coats. It was just really hard to figure out where I had been and get it on appropriately to make sure I didn’t miss any spots, and my guess is that that may have contributed to the ugly part of this review, which is how the actual top coat laid down. Now you saw the video earlier, some of the bubbling that I had. It wasn’t really bubbling; it’s like, um, beading maybe. Now, as I’m looking right now, I’m looking right here at this floor, there is none of that beading right here. It’s a nice smooth piece of top coat, but there are places where that happened. Now, I don’t know what I did wrong. It may very well be something that I did. I followed the directions, which were very good. They had really good directions that came with the kit, but whatever I did, I did something wrong.

So takeaways: if you’re gonna do this yourself, prepare, prepare, prepare. I felt like I prepared way more than I needed to, and it wasn’t enough. The floor was ready to go, nice and clean, pristine, perfect, but I hadn’t prepared myself. I didn’t prepare my spike shoes. I didn’t really prepare my, um, the stuff that I had to, you know, be in there to mix with. I didn’t really prepare my father-in-law. I just kind of threw him in there and said, oh, here’s the instructions, have fun, mix it up. You know, you did a great job, but hindsight being what it is, I probably would have given him a little bit more preparation guidance. You know, make sure you mix it this way and pour it this way or whatever. It all turned out fine, but that’s what I would have changed.

And again, especially with the spike shoes, oh man, those things are a pain in the… If you don’t get them on tight, make sure they’re on tight and make sure you tighten them and get them tested before you’re walking out here on the epoxy. I can’t tell you the number of times that my foot slipped, and then my shoe went right into the epoxy, and I got all over my shoes, and then I had to go re-roll that part of the floor. And there’s a big patch of floor over here that has flakes like embedded all the way down because I had to re-roll it after I’d already flaked it because my foot slipped and went in there. Now you can’t tell that it’s like that because the epoxy covers all that up.

This other thing that I was worried about in the beginning was whether or not the epoxy was going to cover a lot of the flaws that were in the floor, little cracks, little divots, that kind of stuff. And with the flakes, it’s marvelous. I couldn’t even point to where the cracks used to be. I couldn’t point to anywhere along this wall here and tell you where the old concrete pour I had to do to replace the stucco gap where that was. I was worried about that genuinely, and that’s not even an issue.

Is it worth the money? Probably. It really kind of depends on your situation and what you want to accomplish with your garage. There are some competitors out there to Armor Epoxy. I looked them up and did my research, but in the end, I chose Armor Epoxy because it is 100% solids. I didn’t have to worry about the product that I was getting. It came in a kit, had told you all the instructions on how to do it, it came with a primer, it came with a top coat. They were responsive to my messages, and I had a bunch of questions for them. So in the end, that’s what I went with. Would I go with them again? Yes, with some caveats, and that’s the things that I’ve already said: prepare, prepare, prepare. And I would have to go back and ask them what I did wrong to this top coat, why it’s doing what it’s doing, but it doesn’t bother me enough to worry about it. I suppose if I had to, I could put another top coat on, and that would probably take care of it if I did it right because it’ll cover up all that just like a layer of clear coat, but I’m not worried about it.

So there you go, the Bullnose Garage review of Armor Epoxy. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks for watching, guys. We’ll see you next time.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Today we’re going to talk about something that I just bought for the channel: this solid two microphone interview set, lavalier mics, which I’m wearing right now. So I bought this set from Amazon because, uh, my last video sounded a little rough, and it’s because I’m here in the garage, and there’s a lot of echo in here, a lot of reverb, and I had to stand kind of far away from the camera to, you know, do my presentation. So one thing that I noticed while I was cutting that video together was that the audio wasn’t very good. Now, I did what I could in post-processing, and it turned out a little bit better, but still it wasn’t great. So I went ahead and sprung for a set of lavalier microphones, and there’s a two-pack. It’s sold as an interview set, so you know you can have one and whoever you’re interviewing can have one. But I got this because, for one, the price was right; it’s like 20 bucks. And for two, because with two microphones, I can actually have an extension that I can run all the way, basically almost all the way to the other side of the garage. So we’re going to see how this works out so far, and the little bit of work that I’ve done with them, they seem to do pretty well. But we’re going to test them. I’m going to do some garage tests in here with both microphones to see how they work, and I’m also going to take them on the road to see how they sound while we’re in the Bullnose. So without further ado, let’s get to it.

So we’ll do this next part in a little bit of an unboxing style. It comes in this very simple little, uh, plastic case just like this, not much to it. Um, but it’s like a Ziploc baggie, so that’s kind of nice. It comes with this very nice, um, sorry, a very nice solid, uh, carrying bag. So we’ll go ahead and take the contents out of that so you can see what you’ve got. Now keep in mind that I’m wearing one of the lavalier microphones right now as I speak, so one of them is not in the package. Um, here’s the other one. It’s just like what I’m wearing, pretty simple. Plug this end into your phone or your camera, and of course, this goes onto your collar or wherever. It’s a little tight. There we go. It’s like the painter powder coating or something right there got stuck, but it’s not too bad. Just happens once. So it comes with extension cords, which I really like. I’ve actually used that already, and this is a Y-splitter and some extra pop filters so you can have both microphones plugged in at the same time, and we’re going to try that out and see how well that works. So here’s the other extension cord that I’ve already used. Get this out of the way so you can kind of see how long it is. Here, I’m sure the length is written somewhere, but I’m not that precise. It’s about yay long, so that’s what’s in the package. Actually, pretty impressed for 20 bucks.

Now before we get too carried away, I wanted to let you hear what it sounds like when I’m standing here just without a microphone. You can hear the reverb and the echo in my garage. It’s a pretty big space and not a lot of fabric, so that goes quite a bit. Now I got the microphone on, but it’s not plugged in. Next, I’m going to plug it in and let you hear the difference. Now normally, I wouldn’t want you seeing all these wires and stuff that’s hooked up. I would have the extra extension on here if I was going to walk this far away from the camera. I’m probably going to say eight to ten feet away from the camera at this point, and I’ve only got one extension plugged in. I’ve got a whole other extension that I could use if I needed to get further away, and I’ll do that here in a minute. Uh, but for now, I’ve got the lavalier mic plugged in, and I’m not talking nearly as loud as I was last time, so you can hear the difference simply, you know, from me having the mic plugged in.

So here I am all the way on the other side of the garage. We’re probably about 15, maybe 18 feet away from the camera, and I’ve really got to project and yell to get my voice all the way over there so that you can even hear me. And I’m sure that the reverb and echo is just terrible. Now I’ve got all this stuff hooked up and ready to plug in so I can give you a demonstration of that, but right now, obviously, it’s not plugged in. Now this is both extensions. I think each extension is six and a half feet, so that gets you 13 plus to probably, I don’t know, two or three feet from the actual microphone itself, which will get you to about 50 or 16, which is about where I’m standing. So let me go and plug this in, and we’ll see if it makes a difference.

Okay, so here I am standing in the exact same spot. I’m using a very conversational volume. As a matter of fact, if you were standing right next to me here in the garage, you may even have a hard time hearing me because I’m not talking loud at all. I’m not even talking as loud as I normally do to someone standing right next to me, but I’m kind of a loud guy sometimes, so take that into account. Anyway, so this is me standing 16 feet away from my phone slash camera with the lavalier mic hooked up and both extensions. This is as far away as you can get comfortably. Now I could probably back up a little bit more and really, really stretch out this cord, but I’m not going to do that. There’s not going to be any situation that I can think of where I’m going to be this far away from the camera during the same time that I’m going to want to speak to the camera because if I do get this far away, generally I’m going to be doing something in the background maybe or doing like a big part of a project or something, and I’ll just voice over that part. There’s no reason for you to have to listen to me jibber jabber while I’m doing that stuff, so I think this is going to work out fantastic.

Okay, so this should be an interesting test. I’ve got the microphones hooked up in interview mode, which means I’ve got one hooked up there, one hooked up there, and then I’ve got a Y-splitter right here in the middle, and this all comes with a kit, so we’ll see how this works. Now I’m not sure if you can see the splitter here on YouTube, but trust me, it’s there. So I’m talking a little loud right now to make sure that you can hear me, but as I walk over here towards my toolbox, I should be able to drop my volume down and get real close to the microphone, and you should still be able to hear me. And then as I back away and walk over here, I’ll increase my volume a little bit and then walk back over toward the garage door where I should be able to lower my voice once again so you can just hear me with a lavalier mic and talk very nice and softly. That’s very nice. That’s a nice microphone. Good microphone. That’s kind of strange, huh? Yeah, okay, so there we go, interview mode.

Now one thing that I’m going to go ahead and try this for fun is I’m going to walk back and forth with your microphones, keeping my volume at about the same level and kind of turning around, and so I can give you an idea of, uh, how it sounds as I’m walking across the room. Now you may want to use something like this if you have a big room and you want to catch sound from all over the place, different locations, so you can hook up microphones basically just like this. So I’m going to go ahead and walk toward my toolbox now, keeping the same volume, and I’m going to go ahead and turn towards the camera, towards the microphone, and turn around to walk now towards the garage door, keeping the same volume, and turn around facing the camera once again and walk back towards my toolbox. And this time I’m going to turn around towards the back wall away from the microphone just to see how that sounds, and I’m going to do the same thing once I get over here to the garage door, turn it around towards my beautiful flag, and now I’ll walk back towards the middle, and I kept the volume the same the entire time, so we’ll see how that goes. But I think it’s pretty impressive.

Now one of the things that I definitely wanted to test with this set was how it sounds in the wind and with a lot of background noise, and this fan will accomplish both of those, and it will also do it without me needing to go outside where there’s like bugs and dirt and stuff. So, uh, let’s see how it sounds. All right, so we got this thing run as high as it’ll go. It’s pretty much rolling right on the microphone, and we’re gonna see how it sounds with random background noise. Now I might try to take some of this out in gross processing, see how hard that’ll be. Maybe you’ll get lucky and I won’t have to do anything. Okay, so let’s give this a try without the microphone. I am basically yelling at the camera right here, but, uh, we’ll see how it goes.

Okay, I don’t know if you can hear me or not over the sound of a truck running, but the truck is now running, and I am yelling at the camera. Okay, I am now speaking much more comfortably and not actually yelling at the camera, which is still way over there, and hopefully you can hear me a whole lot better. So I’m going to start the truck, and we’ll see how I sound with the engine running. And here I am with the engine running again, not yelling at the camera. Uh, it’s way over there, so everything should be picked up by this, uh, snazzy little microphone right here, so we’ll see how it goes.

So how about we take a little test drive and see how this thing sounds both with and without the microphone while driving at highway speeds? It should be interesting. We’re going to see exactly how well this thing does. I got the, uh, cord caught in the door. Ah, yeah. Okay, so here we are on the interstate. I’m going about probably about 65 miles an hour or so, heading into town. I’m pretty much yelling at the phone at this point, uh, just to make sure that you can hear me. This lavalier mic is not hooked up. I got it on, uh, but it’s not plugged in, so right now what you’re hearing is coming into the phone, uh, the camera, which is a phone. So, uh, you know, I’m spending about, uh, 26, 2700 RPM right here going about 65 miles an hour. Um, so it’ll be interesting to see how this sounds. Just for fun, let’s do this. It’s a nice day outside, you know, sunny, beautiful, perfect temperature, just cruising. It’s cool.

Okay, so here we are, basically the same speed, obviously the same truck. Uh, now I’m using the lavalier mic to pick up my voice now. Uh, I’m not yelling nearly as loud as I was before. I have no idea how much background noise is being picked up by the microphone. It’s a noisy old truck, of course. It’s an ’85. It’s got an inline six in it, so it’s got to spin up pretty high in order to get to going 65, 70 miles an hour, but that’s what we’re doing right now. And I have no idea just how loud it’s going to be, so I’m as interested to hear the results of this as you might be. So let’s go ahead and roll the window down and give that the old testaroo. Whoa, a little bit of a technical difficulty there with a microphone. Clearly, it doesn’t like being close to the window when the window is down.

So we are now on our way home from our little adventure today, and I have moved the microphone over to the right-hand side of my neck, a little bit further away from the window. Hopefully that will take care of this issue. Now what I was saying when I had the window down before was simply that you don’t really want to go too much faster than 70 or 75 in a truck this age with this kind of suspension. It gets a little bit scary, and especially in this truck in particular because it’s got 10-year-old tires. Now it really isn’t very responsible of me to be driving on ten-year-old tires going this fast on the interstate, but hey, you know, by getting to an accident, that’s great television.

All right, here we go. Let’s see if it works this time. Well, there we go, what I would consider to be a semi-successful test of this lavalier microphone. Obviously, I’m not going to be driving it around with the windows down all the time, so that’s not really that big of a deal. Mainly, I got it just so that I wouldn’t have to yell at the phone all the time, and things like the echo in my garage or the background noise from driving the truck around wouldn’t be quite as big of a problem. Now I will likely go ahead and do some audio cleanup in post-processing when I’m cutting together the video, but I’m not too concerned about that as far as this review goes, simply because I’m kind of doing a review of with the microphone versus without the microphone and not so much of this microphone’s quality when, you know, not enhanced after the fact. You know, I mean, I’m going to enhance the audio as much as I can when I do these videos, so, you know, that’s not what I’m testing. What I’m testing is whether or not it’s better with the lavalier microphone than without it and whether or not it’s worth the hassle and the setup of plugging the microphone in, having a big cord running from the phone down through my shirt up to this lavalier right here. Um, that’s really kind of what I’m testing. So, so far, from what little I’ve seen of the uncut videos that I’ve taken, it seems to be much better, so, you know, that’s good, and we’ll definitely take a good look at this video once it’s all done and see how much better the audio quality is with versus without, and if it’s much better with, which I suspect it will be, then I will continue using it for the rest of my videos.

All right folks, so here we go. Final impressions of the 20 Amazon solid 2 microphone interview set that, uh, you saw me using throughout the video. I’m pretty impressed for 20 bucks. Uh, I’m definitely going to keep using it. It makes me sound much better. I don’t have to yell at the camera. It’s a little bit of a pain in the butt to have the wire running down my shirt and going across the floor, but I think I can deal with that for, uh, for what it is. Now obviously it’s got its limitations, but it’s a 20 set of lavalier microphones. I mean, what do you want? You know, it didn’t work so well with the window down in the truck. Um, I noticed it cut out a little bit as I was going over the railroad tracks, and it also cut out just a little bit in the heavy wind of the fan, but, um, I’m not sure what causes that. If it’s some kind of a built-in protection mechanism or if it’s just that the microphone gets overloaded or, heck, I guess it could be the program on my phone. I’m using, uh, Open Camera to be able to use an external microphone on an Android. I mean, come on, Android, get with the program. Really? I can’t use an external mic with your native camera. Anyway, so, uh, yeah, there it is. Like I said, pretty impressed. Um, I will note that during the time when I was walking back and forth from microphone to microphone, I was having some issues with the microphones being picked up by the camera. Um, there were several times I did that bit, and the microphones didn’t work at all, and I’d have to unplug them and then replug them in, and then they would work, and then they wouldn’t work, and then they would work when I only have one microphone plugged in. It always works, so I’m not sure what was going on there. I finally got a bit that was usable, and it does work just if you’re going to use this for an interview or use that configuration, you may just want to keep an eye on that. For me, I’m not really that worried about it. I don’t plan on ever using that. The second microphone is just a backup as far as how I’m going to use it. So, you know, bottom line, four stars. I give it four stars. Definitely, definitely worth the money, and it’s definitely going to improve my YouTube videos. So there you go. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, stick them below, and don’t forget to like and subscribe because that’s pretty cool and really helps me out, especially because I’m, you know, just starting. So thanks guys, we’ll see you next time.

Hey folks, Ed here from Bullnose Garage. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Bullnose Garage right here in my brand new garage, which I finished like literally just a few days ago. Um, so that’s what this episode’s going to be about. Since it’s the first episode and it’s a channel called Bullnose Garage, let’s talk about the garage, um, what I did to it, how I got where I’m at, uh, why I’m super thrilled with how it turned out, and, uh, why I did the things that I did. So maybe if you ever want to do your own garage renovation, uh, you can get some ideas. So away we go! Let’s get this truck out of here so I can show you what we did.

Okay, so here we are in the garage. It’s about 18 wide by like 22 deep and about, uh, eight to nine feet high depending on which side of the room you’re on. I got a flat roof; it’s a little bit sloped. It looks like a sieve. Flat roofs suck. Welcome here, Mexico! Anyway, um, when I started working on my truck, I figured I’d need a nice space to do it in, so this is what I came up with. The first thing that I had to do was actually tear back all the walls to the studs all the way around this hall back over here. So this garage wasn’t original; they added it onto the house and they just built it right up next to the house, right on top of the stucco. So there was actually a layer of drywall, then stucco, then drywall, then the studs. So that was a lot of fun. Had to pour some concrete, do some other stuff. Basically, it was a whole lot of work. But let me give you a tour and I’ll tell you exactly some of the stuff that I’ve added to make this garage my own.

Okay, so starting off in one of the more busy corners of the garage, uh, I’ll show up in the corner. I got my security camera; that’s an IP camera. It’s power over Ethernet. I added that because a lot of plastic car insurance companies ask that you, uh, store the car or vehicle area secured, your garage or storage facility, and they give you discounts and stuff if you have cameras. And when the walls are down, it’s much easier to run Cat5 cable, so I went ahead and did that. I also put cameras all around the perimeter on the outside and have them hooked up to a computer with, uh, camera software on it. So there’s that.

You’ll also notice all the way around the garage that I have a whole lot of outlets. You can never have too many electrical outlets to support that. I had an electrician come in and set me up with a power panel just for the garage. Uh, this house wasn’t 200 amp service; it was only 100 amp service, so we had to upgrade to 200 amp service. That was a significant chunk of change that went into the renovation budget, but had to be done. Um, and now I also, down here, I don’t know if you can see it because I’ve got this in the way here, um, but I’ve got a spot here for 220. So if I ever wanted to have a welder or a very large air compressor or anything over there, I could do that. Of course, got the air compressor, engine tools, lift, voice, all that fun stuff, air hose, power wheel, the works over here.

Now here’s a very important part of the garage: my AC unit. That’s a mini split from Mr. Cool. I was going to do a Mr. Cool DIY, um, but I decided to go ahead and get one of their regular units that’s installed by an HVAC technician because I’m not an HVAC guy, and when it comes to being comfortable, uh, I want to make sure it’s done right, so I’ll let him do that. Other than that, over here, the only thing that’s significant is all the cabinets and stuff. Believe it or not, I got all of these cabinets from a local university for basically like 15 bucks apiece. This is from Public Surplus. If you go to publicsurplus.com and register, look for your area. A lot of times, government agencies, universities, cities, that kind of stuff are auctioning off things just like this, uh, for dirt cheap. So it’s a whole lot cheaper than going out and buying, you know, fancy cabinets or toolboxes, that kind of stuff, and it works great, you know? There we go. And these actually happen to have a little workshop that I can use, so it works out great.

This cord over here, pretty basic stuff, a couple of toolboxes, um, another great big cabinet from a local university. These things are great; they’re awesome. Like, I can’t get over just, uh, how well they work and how cheap they were. So one of the things that you’ll notice if you’re paying attention is that all of my outlets at this level in the garage have USB ports, and that’s so that I can plug in USB things like my phone or these awesome lights from Harbor Freight. These things are great; I love them. I can just keep that plugged in and I don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s going to be charged when I need it. All of the outlets at the same level in the garage have USB ports, just like that.

One of my favorite parts about this garage, believe it or not, is this window. Now, that’s probably stupid, but I just love this thing. I love these blinds that are inside the windows like this. You don’t have to worry about cleaning them or nothing. Like here in New Mexico, everything gets dusty and dirty after just a matter of minutes, really. It’s crazy. And so, yeah, inside the window, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s up and down so nice. Yeah, so my old door was just a plain Jane door with no window. You know, I wanted to be able to look out and see a bird or something every now and then, so it’s pretty neat. I’m probably more excited about it than I should be, but I can’t help myself.

Now we come to the brains of the garage. You see behind me this ginormous television, which is hooked up to a computer system up there. Um, what you see above the computer is actually my POE switch for my cameras. They go into the computer so I can actually look at my cameras on the television or I can surf the web or Fire TV, any of that kind of stuff that I want. Now this is here because I’m not an expert when it comes to working on vehicles. Um, this truck is pretty much the only endeavor that I have when it comes to working on engines or even digging into some of the more technical stuff when it comes to how things run. So because of that, I rely a lot on YouTube and forums and a lot of online resources. So I set this up in such a way so that if I’m over here working on the truck with the hood open, I can just look over at the TV and look at, you know, whatever video I’m needing to get information from or if it’s, like I said, a schematic or a drawing or any of that kind of stuff. So that’s what that’s there for.

Now eventually, right here behind me, I’m going to put a workbench. Um, I haven’t got it built yet, but that’s one of my next projects. And of course, I’ve got my desk, which also serves this sort of work area and a sound system so I can listen to some music while I work. You can see here one of the speakers that’s in my ceiling. I’ve got four of them for the garage. The speaker system also extends out to the patio, and we have a pool that’s got a couple of rock speakers out there. Um, I mean rock like, you know, Van Halen. I mean rock like they’re shaped like a rock so that they don’t look like speakers. Uh, anyway, those are out by the pool so when we’re out at the pool swimming, we can get some tunage, um, and I can also listen in here. And that’s all controlled from the receiver that you see down in the lower left corner of your screen. In this image, you can also see the LED lights that I have set up in the ceiling of the garage. I have also added a little bit of mood lighting just in case I don’t want the stark bright and white of every piece. This was more for fun than anything else, but I’m pretty happy how it turned out.

Here you can see a little bit better my layout for the LED lights. Now these are just super cheap, simple LED lights you can get them from Amazon. The brand name is Barina, and they’re meant to replace the old fluorescents. And I gotta tell you, these things are amazing. They light up this garage like it’s daytime even when it’s nighttime. Uh, so I love them; they’re fantastic. And finally, over here, I’ve got right now what I’m calling my general purpose workbench. Um, it’s probably going to end up being an electrical workbench. I have a 12-volt tester and some other things coming in that I’ll use for, uh, moaning. I may go so far as to rebuild the harness in that truck. I’m not quite sure what I’m gonna do yet, but, uh, yeah, this gives me a space to do all that. Might get myself a drill press, make myself a belt sander or a tabletop sander and grinder, fill this place out so I’ve got some, you know, place to do some real work.

Another one of my favorite things in this garage is the jack shaft garage door opener that sits up there in the corner. So that door opener actually connects right to the torsion bar of the garage door and rolls it open from there without having to have this big clunky overhead chain and garage door opener system with the rail and everything. I wanted everything sort of above my head to be nice and clear just in case I ever wanted to paint, you know, paint a vehicle. That way I can get up and get tall, and especially with the truck, you know, spray paint down. So I didn’t want all that garage opener hardware in the way, and this jack shaft builder solves that problem.

Now the final thing that I’ll talk about here in the garage today is the floor. Now this floor is an epoxy floor; it’s from Armor Epoxy, and it consists of three parts. There’s an epoxy primer, the actual epoxy color itself called racing blue, and then there’s a top coat. In my case, I got what they call a military grade top coat and, of course, the flakes and everything else that goes with it. And I have this mat down here to drive the truck on because the truck does leak just a little bit of oil, and I don’t want all that oil getting on my brand new floor. Now it is a garage floor, and it will get messy and dirty, but for right now, it’s so pristine that I just can’t bring myself to drip anything on it. I do have a review of the Armor Epoxy product coming up where I talk about how it went down and what I think of it, how easy it was or how hard it was to put in, so look forward to that.

So there you go, that’s the Bullnose Garage as it sits today. Like I said, I just finished it probably about last week, so I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of new things going in and a lot of changes being made over time. But if you have any questions about anything that you see, any questions about how I did something or why I did something, or comments, criticisms, you know, it’s the internet, so I’m sure there’s those. But yeah, have any of that stuff, uh, drop it down in the comments, and, uh, we’ll see you next time.