Installing Swisstrax In My Dad's Garage

[Music] so on today's video here as the title says we're going to do a Swiss tracks flooring install from start to finish this is my dad's new house new garage looks pretty typical or they have some paint splatters and things like that on the concrete so yo your options are your options here would be to leave it alone well you could also potentially polish it so you could you could bring in a polisher which is rather expensive you could epoxy coat it but what we're going to do is we're gonna do a plastic floor tile on here specifically switch tracks rib tracks and I'm gonna do an install from start to finish we start with the edge pieces we lay out our center section of the floor with a black border a slate gray will be our base color I'll show you the tools you need the process you would use whether this is a 20 typical 20 by 20 garage like this or you're doing this in a massive facility of some sort so we're gonna take you through start to finish of all of the things that you'll need to go through to do this install process and I'll show you how to how to do that so let's get started alright so step one is always to lay out a row of tiles alright so we're going to lay out a row of housing you're always going to start on the garage door the garage door dixit dictates everything and so what we're gonna do is we're going to start with a row across and then we're gonna fit our edge pieces so there are two different types of edge pieces there are looped and then there are or I guess they call it pegged so these are the loop two edge piece it really doesn't matter which way you go if you do looped then you need to do the pegged end of the of the tile out first if you do pegged then you would do the opposite you would do the loop end of the tile out you know toward the garage door I like the peg I'm sorry I like the loop version it just I don't know the connection I think is a little bit more stout for our edge pieces but basically what we're going to do again we're going to lay out our left to right and then and then we're gonna figure out you know how to Center this and that'll dictate you know where we are against the walls we'll try to make as little cuts as possible and and then we'll start to we'll lay out our edge pieces so we'll probably do and what I normally do is do a couple of rows once we do a couple of rows will actually close the garage door kick it up against the insulation you know the little rubber stripping of the garage door and that'll dictate that'll set our floor and where we're gonna where we're going to set the abuse at the rest comes from from front to back so we'll go and clip these in here and run through this right here real quick please a couple of things that that make these tiles the Swiss track style superior to other options on the market first they're 15 to 3/4 by 15 and 3/4 so they're they're bigger than your traditional 12 by 12 tile think about in your home you know if you did a 12 by 12 verses or 20 by 20 a 20 by 20 is generally gonna be more expensive but also is gonna look that more modern the other thing that's a big advantage of these is they're they are three quarter inches thick so whereas other options are half an inch thick and I mean this is just my estimate you you actually get a little less plastic II feel you know I played volleyball in college and we'd always play on these crappy sport courts that they would just lay right on top of concrete and just think about how miserable it was diving or trying to play on those on those type of tiles this is about as close to concrete feeling as you can get from some plastic flooring and you'll notice how you know how easy this clips together so this like I said this is a pretty good little Saturday project another thing that's important if you'll notice the the bottoms of the tiles notice there are channels or ridges here these channels allow water to run out so this garage like most garage is sloped here and so if you were to drive your car in from the rain or you get snow or sleet if you were in a colder climate the stuff the water can you know we'll follow the concrete and it can run out if it were going to run out anyway so if you you know whether you had plastic tile or not so the basic idea here is that we can cover up all the crap we'll talk a little bit more about dirt as we get this process moving but that's the you know this is the extent of of how we set this up now if you if you go on and you look at the floor designer so on Swiss tracks com I think it's forged lat forward slash forward slash garage forward slash floor designer and just go there and click on the floor designer section under the garage section the floor design there's a little clunky it's not very robust it won't give you like a like let's say that this wasn't perfectly symmetrical and that bump out was a little further out than this bump out and and so one thing you don't want to get too too worried about is the you having the design perfect in the forward designer you just need to make sure you have enough tiles to do the job and so this is where the you know the real world setting up your floor design comes in so we're really just gonna start laying out the floor I want to do a black border that runs here and then back and then runs you know across the edge of the garage I'm not really too keen on setting up parking spaces it's really hard to get that to line up exactly the way you want because these tiles are so so wide at 15 and 3/4 so this is where you just manually start laying out the tiles and you get an idea of where your where your design and how what your design is going to end up looking like so this is where we'll make a manual decision here so here's our tile what it looks like if we were to put you know the tiles up to the edge so we have a tiny little gap here and run it all the way across and then I have a tiny little gap over here so now the question is do I just take one side and bump it all the way up against the edge well and then have a bigger gap and make only one cut and so what's going to dictate that is what our perimeter border looks like as we lay out the tile so again don't get excited just start laying it out if you know we haven't cut anything so we can undo it all so let's start laying on our black border and we'll kind of see how it looks so one thing you want to be sure to take note of as you're doing this is the position of where you're you know where your loops and where your pegs are and so you want to lay it out as simply as possible so I can lay out large sections at a time so in other words it wouldn't make sense for me to go from right to left in this case because I'd have to lift this tile up pop it loose to try to get the loops under and then try to grab the pegs and so you'll see what I'm talking about if you ever do a floor but you'll start to lay it out where it's more efficient to lay it down you can start sort of you can have if you have a couple of people three or four people get your kids they can be the stompers and stomp the tile in place and the other thing you want to make sure you do which I've done before you want to be aware of where your loops and pegs are because it is possible to put this in backwards like if I decided to just go from here I could even though the tile is supposed to go this way with loops and loops it'll still go this way with loops and loops and you'll find yourself like I did this in that HQ one point oh I did it like 45 feet back and I realized I put the darn thing in backwards it was supposed to go this way so just something to keep in mind as you're laying fluor you want to make sure that you don't you don't do huge sections wrong I mean it's kind of hard to do it wrong but it it's frustrating especially if you have a large garage and you're doing a large section you screw it up you can see this will start to go fast I mean we're like two and a half minutes into here if I wasn't chatting you up it'd be even quicker okay so now now is where we want to dictate our tile placement from left to right and this will dictate our cuts so notice the way I have it positioned so if I have a full tile buttered against the wall here then my black border is nicely in line with the wall but then on the right side my black border is off so because of the symmetry of this garage this little bump out section here is identical to this section here and so what we're gonna want to do is lay the floor out symmetrically which means we're gonna want to make we're gonna have to make a small cut all the way across each wall which you know if you are budget conscious you you may you know we're depending on how your garage layout looks you may make some of those sacrifices but if you think about this logically if I cut so if I cut this side off of the tile and that side off of the tile I'm still going to use the same one tile that I cut I end up with a lot of waste in the center but that'll be you know it's a more efficient than you think now I happen to have all kinds of leftover pieces from all these various projects I've been doing so well we should have plenty of extra pieces that I won't even need to cut full tiles but in your case you don't have extra pieces you're gonna be cutting we'll work on cutting here in a minute okay so we're gonna get this whole section centered where we want it and that's gonna dictate our positioning so again I think we're gonna want to tape measure and just have it identical left to right okay so what we're gonna have to do here we're gonna have to pop this after we get this centered actually we're gonna Center it without so pulled up the extreme right and left off otherwise it's gonna interfere with the door eating's pull the one tile out okay so now now we know what our border is gonna look like so now we're gonna put all our edge pieces in place so you can see we haven't needed any tools at all yet other than a tape measure and even that you can you could eyeball it if you wanted to pretty easily okay we've laid out our edge piece all the way across so now we're gonna go I'm gonna close the garage door and we're going to Center this all up okay so we got the garage door closed now what we'll do is we'll take and just hang this up against it and then we're gonna take a tape measure we're gonna measure each side and get it centered up here and actually a really easy thing to do is let's put a tile in place so put a Tuncay you got already got two tiles there get another tile here and I can't do it here because we're gonna have to do some kind of cut right here we're not done of cutting you know this this particular tile so we're gonna we're gonna position it based on our tile number two okay so we've got inch inch in three-quarters two and a half so we need to come that way too much too much too much Susan eight all right so let's make sure buttered up against the door hope our front door hope our garage door straight boom look good so that's how we position our floor I kind of running from left to right so we'll have a roughly two inch cut to make on the side all the way against each wall so see what I'm talking about we're gonna have to make a cut here to cut around that and I haven't bought it up against the insulation of the door and then we're good to go so now we can speed through all of our tile installation here now we want to take note that we don't want to sly the floor around if we can help it but we don't have to be like we can go and fix it we can we can push the whole floor all at once and so we don't have to be too too worried about it but in this particular application the way we've laid this out we want to go from left to right so the best best way to do this start on the left I'll lay out the tiles and then you'll just step on them when you're designing your floor one thing I would urge you to do is when you get the result of the floor designer you end up with a certain number of tiles of each color I would round up I know it this is expensive stuff but I would round up significantly you're gonna screw up some cuts likely and you're also likely gonna end up with some other applications where our tile might make sense like putting it in cabinet or something like that so I would suggest having extras so let's talk a little bit about pricing and other other flooring options so the way that I discovered this stuff and I know people get real angry about plastic flooring for some reason but I discovered this because I had done first I try to do polish concrete and my floor already had existing stains this was in my previous house and so tried polishing it looked like crap and so then I decided to try a clear epoxy as I wanted to I wanted to just look like like concrete but I wanted to look better cleaner and the clear epoxy turned it like really dark almost black look it didn't look good so then we did and I a metal epoxy so the clear epoxy was the base layer anyway and so we did a metal epoxy on top of that the guy that did it is roller it was a pink pink roller blew up while he was rolling and in turn half the dorm floor pink and this is like a five thousand dollar floor you know I was doing this really supposedly awesome looking metal epoxy system with a urethane topcoat it's supposed to be really stout and that within months there was a patch that look well first off that the floor the reason why companies do the chip systems is because it masks the hideousness of all the roller marks and scrapes and scratches and imperfections that you get from rolling out a shiny paint and so they do the chips to disguise all of that crap but I don't like the chips the chips remind me of my grandmother and I just don't want that and so the epoxy first there was a pink spot on the floor like a huge spot like a quarter of the garage pink pinkish yellowish hue Koosh hideous so that was the first problem and he came out and tried to fix it it's kind of scuffed it up a little bit but here's the problem with epoxy you can't just fix it a lifetime warranty doesn't mean squat you can't just seemed it down a little bit and put new epoxy because then it'll peel and so if people think that like well I got a lifetime warranty first of all the guys that are doing flooring don't have anymore be warranting all kinds of stuff and what will happen is they'll come out twice do some hack job fixes and then they'll just disappear and stop returning your call I'm telling you they don't give a crap or they're better Better Business Bureau rating is so they'll tell you they do what they don't so you got to be prepared for all this stuff to happen to you so this stuff cost four dollars a ninety five cents a square foot I sell it for three dollars and ninety-five cents a square wouldn't eat the cost the shipping so it's twenty percent off a list and then whatever the shipping cost is which is substantial if you're doing a big floor or any for its substantial Spanish the cost of shipping I eat that and yeah I mean that's that's the cost they have all that looks and things you can do like vinyl tracks and some other things you can do to kind of spice it up if you wanted to um boring dude so I want it to be simple and clean but this stuff is relatively inexpensive in comparison to some of the other options and it's you're crazy to spend you know if you get it for three dollars and twenty five cents a square foot and get some inferior tile there's just there's no one else can touch this stuff telling me there's no contest I don't know why the other companies that make this wouldn't just copy it yeah I'm sure switch tracks is count their blessings or maybe they have a patent on this sizing but to me this is the best option alright so across the back here mainly because I made a gross miscalculation on how many tiles actually have but we're doing rubber tracks so notice this is a rubber tile this is a plastic tile and I was pliable and you can hear the difference between how Roger sounds and plastic sounds now the rubber tracks can't be driven on but there are more anti-stress if you're standing on them so I do them across the back of garages a lot of times because that's where you're walking and standing a workbench I wasn't intending on doing this but I had some leftover tiles and so this is what we're dealing with and the reason why you can't drive on them they're just softer and then the joints arms aren't as stout so this hopefully we have enough because I again made a serious calculation error I went upstairs and looking on many boxes I had just did a quick rough calculation and sure enough I don't have enough at least not the way I originally planned it but this will look good so because we're gonna use this we're gonna pretend like I planned on this but here is rib tracks smooth and I don't think this is the Eco tile this is just a regular rib track smooth and so because we put a floor mat down here I'm gonna put the smooth tile in right in this section and this will be where the floor mat will go yeah that's gonna work out great actually that's gonna be my new design okay easy parts done so we have the whole center section of the garage it started raining so to bring everything inside you're going to move it back outside again we'll get the whole center section of the garage so now you're gonna have all these partial pieces and so I've been kind of laying out and I have I think all of them so I don't have to cut any full tiles luckily because as I mentioned earlier I don't have nearly enough tiles like I thought I did so here's how you do this this is where you screw this part up I'm cheating a little bit because I'm gonna have a full tile if I had a full tile it's a little more complicated so first want to make sure I have it lined up right so I wanna make sure I have flat edge the flat edge and then flat edge to flatted and this or it gets confusing because the loops are here so your tendency is gonna want to be to go like this and then cut it wrong so anyway so what I'm gonna do is take my measurement which is two and then eight so I take that the tile is gonna go like this but I flip it around and measure my 2 and 1/8 here I'm gonna cut a little bit short now depending on where you are and how temperatures change these will expand and contract or it becomes really problematic is if you have direct Suns if you have your garage door open all the time and direct Sun comes and beats down your 4 tiles are gonna expand and if you if you put it up real tight to the wall the thing is going to bow up like crazy now because most people don't do that I don't leave the garage door open hardly at all in the middle of the day so I never have that Sun beating on it so I don't care so what I normally do is cut it tight so I cut it nice and tight to the to the to the wall now let's talk about tools here so here is a floor tile cutter now this sucker is 750 bucks this entire floor was 800 bucks to do you know a thousand bucks to do so is it metal is it going to make sense to buy a floor tile cutter a $700 floor tile cutter for an eternal floor probably not so what I would suggest you do is get yourself a table saw from Home Depot for a thirty dollar rental for the day and you just make your line and then make your cut and in my case I have a floor tile cutter so I made my line I get it flat and straight this is where having a smaller tile is a little bit problematic and keeping it flush and straight cut and then boom I make my cut so you obviously aren't gonna be able to do that if you don't have this cutter and renting it wouldn't even make sense because it would cost $250 to rent it and ship it back and forth and some specialized case so I'm telling you just rent a table saw or a chop saw or a circular saw and and you can do this job and this might save you 15 minutes in an entire floor so don't worry about having a floor tile cutter if you're buying a eight thousand dollar floor because it's a massive facility it might make sense to buy a four tile cutter or rent one if you can find them but good luck finding a specialized plastic floor tile cutter alright so there's one let's do another one real fast it should be the same dimension yep 208 208 so a lot of times your walls aren't going to be straight and so what you can do is do a measurement here and a measurement here and then just cut it at a slight angle on your chop saw or your or your floor tile cutter or whatever device you have so if there's a lot of times you'll have the wall searched the angle on you and so you'll have to you have to kind of play that game of making a mark there making the mark there and then cutting it at a slight angle you get more efficient at this as you start rolling through tile after tile and sometimes cut it a little too short you can kind of angle the floor up a little bit get it in there nice and tightly but if it's too tight it's gonna blow up on you so that was a little bit long but we got a nice straight cut and again you can get just as good of a cut or close to as good of a cut with a for the circular saw alright so we're gonna start rolling through these here sir I'm doing here something good for the water here you know I made a 15 and 3/4 or a piece of cardboard you can see the other side over here and I made the template side push the cardboard up underneath I'm gonna trace the line right here I'll cut that out just like I did here and that's how I trace the line and then just cut that with a UH with a cut-off wheel you'd be best if you had a jigsaw for this alright so we ended up with four extra tiles so I'm gonna take that this the red track smooth out of here really quite simple you take a paint can opener so this is how you would clean underneath anyway paint can opener just pull pop them right out no problem you know when you're fitting the rubber tracks you want to be sure just use your hand make sure that the that the pegs go into the loops properly because they're a little gentler so the only thing I use for this project tool wise was this right angle cutoff wheel I used a t-square a sharpie and a tape measure and so that's really all we need and then of course you'll use either circular saw a table saw or you know if you're doing a big project you'll have the bullet the big the big you know tile cutter which I could I could source what if you need it but there are 750 to a thousand bucks something like that so let me get the camera handheld here I'll show you around I'll wrap up this project so as I mentioned earlier in the video I had a bit of a bit of a calculation error so we had to improvise which actually turned out really nice I had some extra rubber tracks and some extra black tiles but I was short on the gray the slate gray and so we ended up with a I guess a rear standing area so this will be designated the parking area you know in the center here so that would be designated the parking area and then you have the area in the back here there really isn't enough depth in here to put cabinets so we're gonna put like one small cabinet over here on the right we'll figure that out later here's the cuts I had to make around the around the water heater what you saw what I did was make a little template got it nice and tight all the way in the back all the way on the side you know here's another reason why you would have to have extra tile you'll always find uses for them if you have some extras just making we made a little tray there but I you know I really like how it turned out we ended up having enough black to get rid of the flat tracks or whatever you call those the smooth tracks and then had to make cuts all around the corner now you saw me do this section here I ended up putting a another little small piece of the edge the edge piece all the way down so my garage turned out like you'd expect now since we have og HQ and we have my house it's only a mile from my house there's really no need for my dad to have a bunch of tools and stuff in here and so lighting we have a single four bulb one of my new obsessed garage one of my prime light fixtures so just a single one there I know it's blowing out the camera here as you can see the fixture picture there and so there's lots of shadowing but again it's enough then and not need to I didn't want to run wires and stuff like that all throughout the the garage here so turned out great so there you go another project done you know I'm a dealer for Swiss tracks so we get better pricing than pretty much anyone so might as well might as well get it from me no seriously though it does really help me out helps me continue to do this stuff I bought this floor so don't don't go thinking Swiss track sponsored me I bought it so really pleased thanks for watching stay tuned for the next project and more crazy thanks for watching [Music] what happens when the when the force pulls you back your foot naturally comes off the gas you have to keep your foot to the floor dialed in you

Channel: Obsessed Garage

Views: 671,588

Keywords: matt moreman, obsessed garage, porsche, GT3 RS, 911, ford raptor, detailing, polishing, garage, swisstrax, flooring, garage cabinets, Sonic tools, Sonic, Cabinets, bmw, E92, M3, Le mans Blue, Kranzle, Garage, Cutter, Install

Id: Xmryvky2nTA

Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018