November 2004
Garage repairs
You might well wonder what garage repairs are doing in this section, even more so when you realise it is the actual garage being repaired and not the car itself. The problems with the garage were numerous, the walls were once white (when I started building the car 5 years ago), and the less said about the floor the better!
Walls
The walls were the easiest to sort out, I went out and bought a bucket of Crown Once (one coat emulsion which doesn't do as it says) and the worst paint roller known to man, every time you used it the roller came off the handle! So after swapping to a 4" brush I finally got the walls painted.
Unfortunately this showed up a worse problem, the garage floor.
Floor
Various things have been written about the surface of the moon and how cratered it is, well you needn't have gone to the moon for information just look at my garage's floor, at the worst points there are craters and cracks over an inch deep, and the rest of the surface is extremely poor. It had been painted with garage floor paint once and is still a horrible surface so something had to be done.
The pictures below show it after the walls had been painted.
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So now we have a dilemma, what do you do to sort out this floor, it needs to be flat(ish) so you don't lose anything, it needs to be hardwearing and also comfortable to work on.
The first option is to have the floor reconcreted, however this is out because of a couple of reasons
It would cost a lot of money
The garage isn't mine and is rented
You would need to keep the car outside for over a week until the concrete set
And then wait another month before the floor could be sealed and painted!
So not really ideal, after a bit of thought I came up with the idea of metal plating the floor (far too expensive) and then I had a flyer offering a Vat-Free day at Machine Mart. The Vat Free days are usually a bad idea as I tend to buy too many tools and then try and remember what I wanted them for! However on this occasion one of the product lines they stock is ribbed rubber sheeting, it comes in a roll 1.2M wide and 10M long; now my garage is ~2.3M wide and ~6M long but the last metre is lost under shelving and the doors.
Now do you see what I am thinking - rubber floors!!!!
The one thing Machine Mart don't mention in the catalogue is that the roll weighs in at 46Kg so it proved interesting to get it in the car and then back out and into the garage.
The fitting was fairly easy I filled the biggest cracks with building sand, and then drilled, rawlpluged, and screwed the rubber to the floor ensuring it stayed fairly flat. The biggest problem was going to be at the front where the car drives into the garage, it was going to need something extra to ensure the tyres didn't rip it up.
So to combat this an ali strip was laid and screwed both into the subfloor and into the rubber as well, finally sealing this to the floor and then making sure that the gap between the two strips of rubber was sealed as well. This took an entire cartridge of silicone sealant which took an age to dry. The rubber shouldn't move as there are 70 screws holding it to the floor.
The final costs were...
£35 Rubber Matting
£10 Screws and rawlplugs
So not too bad then.
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The marks in the floor are the dust caused by drilling the floor, and were swept up after the sealant had dried.