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Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. What is a bullnose and why do I have one? A bullnose is a Ford truck built from the years 1980 to 1986, like the one behind me. This one here is a 1985 F-150. Bullnose trucks are F-150, F-250, F-350, or Bronco, anywhere from ’80 to ’86. And why are they called a bullnose? Well, because the front of the truck looks kinda like a bull’s nose, if you imagine.

So why do I own a bullnose? Well, it’s a project truck for me. I’ve always loved Ford trucks. In fact, my daily driver is a 2007 Ford F-150, so the F-150 platform is something I know and love very much. And I wanted something older that I could work on, something carbureted, something that was easy for me to sort of sink my teeth into and learn how to rebuild engines and do all the kind of mechanical stuff. See, my entire life I’ve been a computer guy. I write programs for a living, so I never really worked very much with my hands. And I thought, what better way to get my hands dirty than to do it on an old Ford truck? So, my project.

So why did I choose this particular truck? After all, I had to drive all the way to San Antonio, Texas, to pick it up. Well, I couldn’t find any trucks like what I was looking for around here. So what does that mean? Well, first of all, as you can see, it’s in pretty good shape. The paint’s a little faded, but there’s no rust, and the body is really straight. So that’s one thing. Another thing that’s pretty obvious is that it’s a short bed. Now, I was looking for a short bed because I want a truck that’s going to be a little bit sportier, because I’m planning on putting a few more horses under the hood and making like a little street truck out of it. Now, I’m not going to do any kind of racing or anything, but what I’m going for would be better with a short bed, so I wanted to make sure I got one of those.

It also runs really well. I basically could just drive it right out of the box, except for the fact that it’s a manual. So I knew I wanted a manual because I’d never driven a stick shift before in my life. And I figured, what better way to learn how to drive a stick than to buy a vehicle that I can’t drive unless I know how to drive a stick? So I had to teach myself, and that’s what I did. And I’m glad to say that it works. I can now drive a stick shift. At least I can drive this stick shift.

The last thing that I wanted to make sure that I had, no question, was air conditioning. I mean, because come on, I live in New Mexico, and it is hot as in New Mexico. Let me go ahead and start her up, and I’ll let you take a listen. The engine in this truck is an inline six, and it’s got an NP 435 manual transmission. That’s a four-speed, but it’s effectively a three-speed. The first speed is granny low. I mean, I could throw this thing into first gear, get out, and walk alongside it. So you basically never use first gear in a truck like this.

Even though I pretty much just started my channel last month, I’ve had the truck for a couple of years, so I’ve had some opportunity to do just a little bit of work to it. So let me just briefly go over some of the stuff that I’ve already done. I’ve changed all the fluids, including this stuff. I’ve replaced both side mirrors. I’ve replaced the door and window seals, and I replaced the door striker. I’ve repositioned the license plate so the tailgate doesn’t smack it when it comes down. I’ve changed the battery twice. I have replaced the alternator. I replaced my marker lights and updated the blinkers. I replaced my tail lights. I’ve wrapped the steering wheel, and I’ve replaced the rear view mirror. I added LED dash lights and LED interior lights. I let someone from Craigslist load something into the back of my truck with a forklift and bend the bed. So that’s my bullnose.

But I’m not done. I mean, I started this channel with the intent of making videos for people who may have a similar truck or similar interests, and mostly because I’ve never done this before. And this is all gonna be a learning experience for me. And so I’m kind of hoping that by going through this and having a learning experience that, uh, if I film it, maybe I can help some other folks. So let’s talk about what my plans are for the bullnose and for this channel, and I got a whole bunch of them.

So obviously the big deal is a new engine. The truck right now has a 306. It’s an inline six. These motors are bulletproof, and there’s going to be a lot of people, a whole lot, that are going to tell me that I shouldn’t swap the motor, that the 306 is one of the greatest engines that Ford ever made, and it’s ridiculous to pull a perfectly good running 306 out of a truck and put in something different. But a 306 is not the engine that I want for my application. What I want is something with a little more punch. So what I’m putting in there is a 351 small block, and I actually already have one, but that’s a future video. Eventually, I would like to stroke it, probably to 408, and get between 400 and 500 horsepower. But that’s a long ways down the road. I think to begin with, I’m just going to go ahead and do a regular engine rebuild, and I might put a couple of power adders on there, but I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do with that just yet.

And of course, um, I’m going to do basically everything that I can to make the truck as nice as possible. So we’ll do some interior work. I’m going to work on the interior molding, make it look nice. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do, if I’m going to spray paint it or if I’m going to wrap it with some kind of fabric or, you know, what I’m going to do there. I do know I want to put some kind of sound deadening on the inside. I do want to add carpet. Right now it’s just that old rubber mat on the ground. I want to take care of that. I’m going to have to reupholster the seats or get real nice seat covers, but I think I’m probably going to end up reupholstering.

Um, so I’m also going to do a lot of electrical work. When I inherited the truck, well, when I purchased the truck, whoever I inherited it from did some questionable electrical work, so I need to go in and take care of some of that. I’m going to replace the headlights with probably LED headlights, and eventually I’ll be putting in a stereo system, probably putting speakers in the door panels and adding things wherever I can figure out how to add them. I might try to put a double din radio in there. I’m not quite sure yet. I’ve got an extra dash piece, um, bezel for the radio, so just, uh, I screw it up, I’ve got an extra, so we might try that for an episode.

Um, I gotta change the horn. The horn that’s in it right now is stupid. Maybe one of these times I’ll honk it for you and let you hear it. It’s wearing, it’s really terrible, so I want to upgrade the horn. Um, at some point I may paint the truck. I’m not sure if I have the ability to actually spray paint a vehicle, but I think I’d like to try. I’ve watched a lot of videos on it. I’ve seen a lot of instructional videos and read a lot of websites and forums and stuff. And, uh, we’ll get it sanded down and strip back probably to metal and put some primer on it and get sanded and do all the blocking and everything else and then pick a color and maybe paint it.

I’ve also thought about putting vinyl on it in terms of like a vinyl wrap, although I wouldn’t wrap the entire truck, but I might wrap parts of it rather than do a two-tone paint job because I’m not sure I could pull off a good two-tone paint job, especially since I’ve never painted a vehicle before. I’ve thought fleetingly about doing a crown vic swap. So for older Ford trucks, especially older ’79 or older, the generation before mine, a lot of guys put crown vic front ends in them from 2002 and forward Crown Victorias because they basically just bolt right in, and they’re more of a car suspension, so they handle power much easier and they ride much better. You can do a crown vic swap on a bullnose. It’s a lot more work than, um, it’s called a dent side from the earlier generation up to ’79, but it can be done. So I’m thinking about that.

Regardless of whether I do that or not, I’m going to have to upgrade the suspension on the truck just because it’s a little sloppy, and I’m putting a little bit heavier engine in there, and it’s going to have more power, so I want to make sure that I’m not falling down on my suspension. Um, I’ve thought about upgrading the transmission. A, uh, NP435 isn’t exactly a race transmission. Not that I’m gonna be racing it, but it’s a very solid truck transmission that drives like a truck, and it could probably handle four or five hundred horsepower as long as you’re not working it too hard. But what I’d really like to have is the ZF5. The F5 transmission is a heavy-duty, still a truck transmission, but it’s a five-speed with overdrive. And, uh, the fact that my truck doesn’t have overdrive right now is rough, um, especially on the interstate, you know, going 65, 70 miles an hour, it’s spinning pretty high. So I’d really like to have an overdrive transmission.

If I had all kinds of money, I’d go out and get a TKO transmission and, you know, put one of those in there, but they’re big bucks, so we’ll see what happens. And I’ve also thought about maybe changing the rear end, uh, getting a locking differential or changing the gears. Um, to be honest with you, I don’t remember exactly what the gears in there are right now. I’d have to look it up. I have it written down somewhere, but I’ve thought about changing the gears and doing a gear swap in the back and adding a locking differential. Obviously, I’ll be upgrading the tires and the rims. In fact, that’s probably coming in the next couple of weeks, and, uh, I’ll be doing things here and there to spruce the truck up and, uh, just make it better overall.

So I’ve got a lot of plans, and hopefully they pan out, and hopefully you guys get to see them because I’m really excited about doing all this stuff on camera and, uh, getting some of this stuff out there, especially when it comes to the engine. I’ve got some really interesting ideas as to what I might do in terms of, you know, pistons and heads and camshaft and that kind of stuff and how I’m going to get to the horsepower numbers that I eventually want to get to. Um, thinking about maybe using some cheap eBay parts just to see how they work. I mean, I’ve got a donor engine, so if I blow it up, then, well, I mean, I still got the original 306 I could drop back in if I had to, or, you know, 351 ones aren’t that hard to find in that junkyard somewhere. So yeah, I may have a little bit of leeway to screw up. I mean, it’s my first engine build ever. I’ve never even worked in a small engine before, so, um, I may be biting off more than I can chew, but hey, you know, that’s part of the channel. That’s, uh, that’s part of what we’re doing here.

All right guys, there you go. That’s a bullnose. That’s my bullnose. That’s what I’ve done, what I plan to do, my plans for the channel, all that stuff. So if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. As always, thanks for watching guys. We’ll see you next time.

Hey folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Today we are on the way to, uh, pick up some parts. Anybody who’s done any vehicle restoration, especially of an older vehicle, knows that parts are very important. In fact, they’re one of the hardest parts of restoring a vehicle. So actually, the parts that I’m going to pick up today are some interior parts for the inside of the Bullnose: um, door pillars, visors, and actually, uh, the whole dash piece. It’s not the gauge or any of the trim, but it’s the actual dash, big plastic piece itself. And, uh, you can’t find those. You can’t buy them online anymore. They don’t even reproduce them. So the only place to get them is from old vehicles. And I happen to have somebody here in town who does sort of the same thing that I do, and he goes out and gets old vehicles, tears them down, strips them for parts, and then sells those parts on Facebook Marketplace, which is where I found him. And he’s already got the parts to our part. All I got to do is go pick them up. So that’s what I’m doing now.

As anybody who’s done an old vehicle restoration can tell you, sometimes the hardest thing is parts. In fact, I would wager a guess that the hardest thing is parts. Not just sometimes. A lot of these old vehicles, some parts you can get reproduced, but a lot of them you can’t. Again, in my case, I can’t find these door pillars, and the ones in my truck aren’t that bad, but they’re cracked. And if I wanted to try to repair that, I’d have to, I don’t know, do some plastic work or fiberglass or something, and I don’t want to do that. It’s much easier for me to find the parts that come out of another truck. Now, you can sometimes go online to find these parts, places like LMC Truck for this particular truck or CarParts.com, used to be JC Whitney. Sometimes you can get them from eBay. Sometimes you can get them from Amazon, although you don’t usually get the older parts from Amazon. But so far, my best resource has actually been the guy I’m going to see right now.

So if you can somehow forge a relationship with somebody in your area that has the kind of part that you need, then you’re golden. You can always go to a pull-apart. In my area, there’s not a whole lot of pull-aparts around. Now, there’s a lot of yards that have old vehicles, but they don’t advertise, and you have to just kind of drive up and hope that somebody’s there. And the pull-apart parts don’t tend to have vehicles that are as old as my Bullnose. Sometimes they do, but you got to get in there really quick. So again, I have found that the best place really is Facebook Marketplace. Another great option that you have, and one that I will almost certainly use, is finding a parts vehicle. That is, finding a vehicle that is the same general make and model as the one that you’re trying to restore. In my case, it’s an ’80 to an ’86 F-150, 250, 350, or maybe a Bronco. Finding one that’s going for a cheap price because either it doesn’t run or it’s got some other kind of a mechanical issue, and you load that thing up on a trailer, you tow it home, and then you can scavenge the parts that you need out of that. In a lot of cases, that’s going to be about the only place that you can find the kind of parts that you’re going to need. And if you’ve got a vehicle that’s more or less complete that way, then you can pull everything off of it, and then whatever you don’t need, you can sell.

For me, I’m both lucky and unlucky to live where I live. I live in the Southwest, so vehicles don’t really rot down here. They last forever. You know, the truck that I have is from ’85, doesn’t have a spot of rust on it. A whole lot of vehicles you see driving around are really old and vintage because they just don’t rust down here. But that does mean that the interiors wear out, and also especially the dashes get cracked really bad because the sun shines in and just destroys any kind of plastic or anything really down here that the UV can get. You know, especially on the older vehicles that don’t have the same UV protection in the glass that the newer vehicles do. So it’s sort of a double-edged sword. I can find great bodies and great frames, really nice metal parts, but all the plastic is just destroyed, and a lot of the trim on the outside of the vehicles is also that way, also destroyed by the sun. So it kind of depends on where you live as to what you can find and what you can’t in a junkyard or from a local dealer. And that’s where you may have to go on to eBay. But what’s nice is that if you live in a place like the Southwest where I could find a great body, maybe not such great interior bits, but a great body, then what I can do is I can pull off the parts that I need and then turn around and sell the parts that are nice that I don’t need because my other vehicle is also nice. I can sell those on eBay to somebody from the North who needs rust-free parts, and that just gives me more money to play with.

Let’s take a look at some of the parts that I got, and I’ll use them to kind of go over some of the things that I think are going to be important to finding parts for older vehicles or for restoration vehicles. So we’ll start with these door pillars. These are the door pillars that I got from that guy locally. They look pretty good on first inspection. They’re the same color as the interior of my truck, and the pictures online look fantastic. But if you look real close, I’m not sure you can see this or not, but there’s a crack right there, and that’s exactly the same that the door pillars in my truck are cracked. And that’s the entire reason I went to go pick these up was because I needed to find a way to get that crack fixed. And the easiest way is to find old stock, so that’s something to note. One thing is understand that if you find old parts in a junkyard or from someone on Facebook in a vehicle that’s already been on the road, it’s gonna be used. There’s nothing you can do about that. The pictures on Facebook aren’t going to pick this stuff up. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even really notice it until I got home. Now, it was still a good price, so I don’t regret buying it because it’s always good to have a backup, which is another good tip. Always have a backup of the parts, especially parts that you can’t find anywhere else because if I want to try to maybe paint this or fix this with some super glue or some epoxy or something, I can do that, and if I screw it up, I’ve still got my original. It’s in my truck, so that’s not a big deal.

One thing to note about parts that you can’t find online and you have to go somewhere to get, like an older truck or an older vehicle, is that a lot of these parts always fail the same way. For example, these here, this crack right there, this one here, exact same crack in the exact same place, and both of my pillars in my truck have cracks in this exact same way, in this exact same place. So a lot of these parts fail the exact same way, whether it’s a weak design or just the way that people take them on and put them off. For whatever reason, a lot of parts tend to fail the same way, so be on the lookout for that.

Another part that I got was these visors. Now, these visors actually are in quite a bit better shape than the ones that I have in my truck. And again, what’s great about these is that if I need to, I could probably take this all apart and redo it. You know, I don’t know if you reupholster visors, but put new coverings on them. And then if I screw them up, well, I’m only out the money that I use to buy this stuff, so, and it wasn’t that much. I got a good deal on it.

The last thing that I got was this interior complete interior dash piece, which is nice because it’s got the glove box, it’s got the AC vents, it’s got the entire AC duct work behind it. Now, it’s got the environmental controls, but these don’t match my truck because this one’s got a selector switch for front and rear gas tank, and my truck’s only got one gas tank, so I can’t use this. But I might be able to pull this off and sell it, or even in the condition that this one’s in, probably more likely give it to somebody who’s going to need it, and then I can forge a friendship with someone who needs the same kind of parts that I do.

Another good thing to note, which I don’t have an example for here, although the AC unit controls here is kind of an example of this, is just because the part fits a year that comes off of your vehicle or a generation, maybe the same truck. For example, I believe these parts probably came out of a Bronco, which is the same generation as my truck and generally has the same interior pieces. But just because they came off the exact same vehicle, the exact same year, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to fit. So you got to make sure that you buy parts that you know are going to fit your vehicle. So these parts that you need, just, yeah, if you need to take them off your vehicle first and inspect them to make sure that they’re the right fit. You could, uh, a lot of times these parts have part numbers on the back. I don’t know if you can see that right there, but there’s part numbers right there, and those part numbers will tell you exactly what part you’re looking for. So always be, uh, cognizant of that. That just because it comes off a vehicle the same make and model and maybe even same year doesn’t always mean that it’s going to fit. On the other hand, some parts from vehicles of a completely different generation may fit yours. So for example, this is an ’85 F-150. The generation goes from ’80 to ’86, but the following generation of trucks from ’87 to ’91, a lot of times parts and pieces from those trucks will fit directly into this truck. Parts of the chassis, parts of the suspension, the interior parts like seats, that kind of stuff sometimes just a basically direct swap.

So learn in your vehicle what different generations parts are interchangeable. A lot of times, uh, especially, you know, for this truck here, there’s a site called Gary’s Garage Mahal that has a lot of interchangeability information, and, uh, those sites are really invaluable. So if you can find a site like that that has interchangeability information for your vehicle to other vehicles of the same make and model but different generations, that’s a great resource when you do find parts that are hard to find for your vehicles. And if you can get a good deal on them, even if they’re not perfect, you may want to go ahead and grab them because there’s a lot of ways that you can refinish parts like this. Even with the crack, you know, I could super glue this crack. I could perhaps put some epoxy in here. Um, I could repaint this whole thing, and if you get textured spray paint, then you cover this up and never even know the crack was there. And as long as you seal the crack well enough so that it doesn’t reappear when you put your screw in, then you’re good. You could put fabric over top of this. I’ve looked at doing maybe some canvas or some other kind of fabric that you can get some spray adhesive and spray on and then roll on top of this. And again, if I’ve got an extra piece and I screw it up, oh well, I’ve got the original still in my truck. Pieces like these visors, you could cover these with basically whatever you wanted. I could go get some denim and cover them with denim. You can make the look in your vehicle whatever you want. Now, unless you’re going for specifically the OE original equipment look, then your options are more limited. But I’m not really doing that. I’m just kind of going for what I think looks cool, so I could cover these with anything I want.

Another option that you have, especially for plastic parts, is to dip them. So I may, I’m not sure yet, but I might dip my dash. Dipping is a really cool procedure where you have a film that goes on top of a tub of water, and you dip a plastic part into the film, and the film attaches to the plastic and then wraps around it. If you’ve never seen any videos of it, it’s really cool. You should check that out. I’m definitely thinking about maybe doing that for some parts in my dash.

So I talked earlier about how I got these parts from Facebook Marketplace, and there’s a reason why Facebook Marketplace is my favorite place to get old parts. We’ll get into that in just a little bit, but before I do, let’s go over some of the places where you can get new parts for trucks, especially like the ’85 F-150 behind me. So you can go to LMC Truck. It’s lmctruck.com. They’ve got parts for Ford, Chevy, GMC, Dodge, all these different kind of older trucks, and they’re a fantastic place to get whatever parts you can that are reproduced. You can usually find them at LMC. You can also go to Rock Auto. Rock Auto is a good place to get, uh, automotive parts, more mechanical parts. Usually, you can go to CarParts.com, it’s formerly JC Whitney. I’ve already said that. Of course, eBay is a fairly decent place to get parts, especially you can get new or used parts from eBay. eBay is the place where I would go to sell parts if I parted out a vehicle because you could also go to Craigslist, but your local area usually, especially in a smaller area like I live, you don’t have a lot of options to sell especially specialty parts for older vehicles. So eBay is usually your best bet there. It’s also your best bet to find those parts because of that same reason. You can go to Amazon. Amazon sells basically everything except for old used parts you can’t find anywhere else. Um, of course, there’s the old standbys: AutoZone, O’Reilly’s, Napa, those kind of places, but you’re probably not going to find vintage parts there. That’s for things like, you know, oil filters and spark plugs, that kind of stuff. Um, if you’re doing a performance build, then you can look at places like Summit Racing or Jegs to get your performance parts. And, uh, there’s always, again, the option of going to a pick-apart, although I’m not a huge fan of pick-a-parts. Again, because the ones around here especially don’t have vehicles that really match the years and generations that I’m looking for. And then you have to bring a bunch of tools with you. You’ve got to go into the yard. Sometimes it’s muddy and dirty and nasty and disgusting. You got to crawl around, and you have to know, which is kind of a downside for me, is you have to know how to get to the part that you want. I’m a rank amateur at this stuff, so even though I know where the part is and what the part is, it may be hard for me out in the field to know exactly how to get it out. And I don’t necessarily want to go take a Sawzall to somebody’s, you know, junk or truck, even though it’s a junker truck, just to get the part that I need. So I tend not to go to pick-a-parts unless I really, really need a specific part that I can’t find anywhere else. And then, of course, like I said before, there is Facebook.

So let me give you an idea of why I think Facebook is really, right now, as of October 2020, the best place to find some of these old parts. Now, the complaint that I had earlier about Craigslist was that it’s only good for the local area, and you may say, ‘Well, Ed, that’s the same problem with Facebook Marketplace.’ You only get results from your local area, and that’s true. You do only get results from your local area. But Facebook has something that you really should take advantage of if you’re restoring an older vehicle, and that’s Facebook groups. Because I guarantee you, no matter what vehicle you’re trying to restore, there is a Facebook group for your vehicle. There is at least half a dozen Facebook groups for this truck right behind me. There’s a Bullnose group, there’s a Ford truck group, there’s a group for the engine that I’m using, there’s probably a group for whether or not the truck is lifted, there’s a group probably for the color of the truck. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but there’s a group basically for anything, and there’s new groups being started all the time on Facebook. If you join these groups, you’re going to get together with a bunch of people who are like-minded, who have the same sort of passion for that vehicle that you do, and they probably know collectively way more than you’ll ever know. Even if you’re an expert, you can always ask the group questions to get answers to, you know, whatever problems you may be facing with your vehicle. And if you’re looking for a specific part, nobody’s going to know how to find that part better than this humongous group of people who work specifically on that kind of truck out of a passion for that. Well, I said truck, but whatever vehicle it is, right? I deal with trucks, so I say truck. But, you know, in my case, if I was looking for, for instance, the trim. Now, I’ve got a chrome trim around my wheel wells here, but there are a lot of these F-150s and Broncos that have trim up on the side or they come down a little bit further down, and a lot of that trim they don’t reproduce, and it’s almost impossible to find. Trucks that did have that trim a lot of times didn’t survive, and the ones that did have the trim and did survive, the trim can be in really bad shape. So maybe somebody removed it. Trucks like that in a junkyard, the guys that know that this trim is worth a lot of money go and scavenge that trim pretty much right away. If you need that kind of a trim or that kind of a part for your vehicle, the only place that you’re going to be able to find it with any kind of reliability is going to be these groups. Now, you may have to pay a pretty penny for it, but I have been shocked at the number of times that I have seen someone ask for a part that is incredibly rare or incredibly strange or something I’ve never even knew came standard on some of these trucks, and I’m thinking, ‘Man, they’re never going to find that part.’ And within a couple of hours, somebody responds and says, ‘Yeah, I got one of those in my shed. I got one of those in my garage. PM me and we’ll get together.’ That stuff happens all the time. So if you’re restoring a vehicle and you’re looking for these parts, join a group. Join a group on Facebook. Even if you don’t have a Facebook, I mean, who doesn’t have a Facebook? But even if you don’t have a Facebook, it’s worth joining Facebook just for one of these groups. Learn how to use it. Learn how to do it because if there’s a part you’re looking for specifically, that’s where you’re going to find it, is one of these Facebook groups.

There you go, guys. Parts, you need them, you want them, you got to have them, and those are the only ways that I know how to get them. Now, I’m sure there are other ways, and if you know other ways or better ways, please let me know. Drop it in the comments, send me a private message, whatever you got to do, and I’ll, you know, make a video about it later. But yeah, let me know what your best way to get parts are. For me, these are the ways that I know how to get them. So as I said before, parts for these old vehicles, sometimes they’re the hardest part. Now come on, I’m a new dad. I gotta be able to make dad jokes. That’s just part of who I am now. So if you don’t like puns, you’re probably on the wrong channel. All right, guys, as always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, and we’ll see you next time.

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.