- [Trainer] Morning Trainiacs. Today, I'm gonna show you
how to turn a space that is otherwise used
for a whole lot of nothing, into this.
A life-sized fully decked out top of the line
Zwift set up powered by a projector.
This winter is gonna be good.
It just got a whole lot better.
(upbeat music)
So over the last couple of months
I've legitimately been a little bit worried
about what's gonna happen this winter
when lockdown is still on
and can't travel at all throughout the winter.
Now we might go to Challenge Daytona.
If things open up at all in the States
and we can get health insurance
and we can travel down there
we don't have quarantine when we're back,
maybe we'll go down to Phoenix or something like that
from January to March,
but odds more than anything are looking like
we're gonna be in here.
So might as well make it really, really good.
And now that I've got the office space in the house,
I didn't need the office space right here in the corner.
So I figured why not make this corner
a lifesized Zwift set up?
I've been thinking about doing it basically
since we built the studio here
and I'm gonna show you how I did it.
And there's a surprise for you about what we use.
(upbeat music)
I've Watching Woods it's fun.
So I've been thinking about this for a while,
and I've always thought about it
in terms of let's just get a projector
and put it on one of the walls
and then I'll bike in front of that projector,
maybe at most well paint one of the walls white.
But as I started thinking about this, I thought,
I want it to be really immersive.
I want it to feel like I'm in the world.
I don't want to just be in the middle of the garage
I wanna to feel like I'm riding in Zwift.
So what I ended up doing is I want to create this enclosure.
And then I started thinking
am I gonna have to build walls and then paint them black?
And am I gonna have to make something by scratch?
But I ended up figuring out that this,
is essentially a golf enclosure.
So these come premade and I'll link everything that I used
in the description below.
Some of those will be affiliate links. Some of them won't,
it's really just for your information
so you know what we use.
And I bought a premade golf enclosure.
So it comes with the screen.
It comes with the walls.
It comes with basically everything you need besides
the metal tubing here.
Now, because it's getting shipped to you.
The metal tubing has to then be purchased at Home Depot
to bind nine,
10 foot lengths from Home Depot and then with a sawzall and
and metal cutting blade.
We cut them to size here.
And as a bonus you can use the leftovers for
festivals this year. Aluminum, high strength
to wait for you.
If you are going this route,
just know that in my experience what happened with this,
is we bought a 10 foot wide by seven
foot high enclosure.
And then we had to cut the poles to size.
It says, that this is 10 feet wide and we have exactly 10
feet of space. But then what it actually wants is 10 feet
four and a half inches.
We don't have those four and a half inches.
That's what she said.
So what we ended up doing was we cut all of these,
making it as large as we could in the space that we've got.
And then,
because that was gonna create a bunch of wrinkles in the
screen, we had to then go get bungees
and bungee manually the screen to stretch it.
So it didn't have all of that extra slack in it.
But as you can see
the screen doesn't really have any wrinkles in it.
So if they don't have the exact size that you need,
you can get a screen that's just a little bit too big
and then stretch it around the edge.
I'm sure they don't recommend it,
but that's what we ended up doing.
Now up here is how we power all of this.
You don't need something that is this big, frankly
you can just use an iPad, but in the summer,
when I got a little bit addicted to do maternal I ended up
building myself a gaming computer.
I've since not really been a whole lot into gaming
so I had this two thousand dollar paperweight.
But, you know what it powers really well
at a very high quality? Zwift. Pushes a lot of pixels.
So I ended up putting this gaming computer up here.
Out of the way.
And then, basically I just went to Best Buy
and I said, what's a decent projector.
And the, just barely under a thousand dollars kinda budget.
And they said that this one was kinda decent.
It's the Epson 3LCD.
Just get any sort of projector that you want.
Run a HDMI cable from this to that later on
I might mount this from the ceiling
but right now, off to the side here,
right by the gaming computer, it's actually like out of the,
but it seems to work.
Now, to control this whole thing.
You're obviously not going to want to have a computer set up
right in front of you or having a desk bulking up the way
that isn't very immersive.
So what I've set up is I'm going to have my cycling desk
right in front of me, that tucks in under the handlebars.
And then I bought just
this basic Logitech I think it's 35 dollar.
A builtin wireless keyboard and mouse.
This is what all of those Zwift people end up setting up
when they're doing a gaming setup.
They use something like this
that is as discreet as possible.
They put it on that desk that's in front of the bike
and then they set themselves up
and then just tuck it out of the way
have everything that they need
as far as nutrition off on the side of the desk.
This plugs into the back of the gaming monitor with a little
Bluetooth USB dongle. And I connected right away
there was no pairing process, nothing like that.
Then obviously I've got to ride on something.
So I am going to set this up with the Tacx 2t Neo.
Tacx full disclosure is a sponsor of the channel
but, I've always said for the last bunch of years
that whether you've got the Tacx 2t Neo,
whether you have the Wahoo KICKR that top of the line unit,
whether you've got the Hummer H3,
all these top and of the line trainers are phenomenal.
In the testing that I've done recently,
the Tacx 2t Neo is just the best road feel out there.
It's as smooth as could be shifting from one power to
another shifting up and down,
adding and taking away resistance
as you're going over Hills.
Its by far the best experience that I've had.
Now with this,
you obviously don't get the climb that's on the front.
But what I was ending up using Zwift for mainly was really
structured workouts,
where I was hitting key intervals and not just going in free
riding for four or five six hours for that.
I bundled up and I went outside.
So doing all these key workouts inside,
I ended up not actually using the climb feature that much.
I don't know if I've used it really at all over the past 18
months. So to have this very road like feel in here,
have that immersion,
even have the cobble feature that when you go over
cobbles in this Zwift world
this go and have that smoothness
and still the stability of this nice wide base,
but having a little bit of play up here.
So it doesn't feel like I'm riding on a two by four.
This I'm thrilled with. I'm really, really happy with it.
And I'm not just saying that. Now here's the surprise.
The well-trained eyes out there will notice.
There's a green mat right in front of the screen.
Well.
This also now functions as golf simulator.
I ended up buying the SkyTrak golf simulator.
I played golf a ton as a kid.
I played on one of the local junior teams.
And then when I bought a car,
I got too busy to golf
and I got instantly really, really bad.
And then basically gave it up for the last 15 years.
But with the extra time of no travel,
no racing and not a ton of training,
I got back into golf. So now I can work on this year round.
This is just really a good excuse to have some friends over
and have something that's just fun. However,
I am really obsessed with trying to get down to a single
digit handicap again. I got to work on my consistency.
Lionel, your move.
So that's a trainiacs.
That is the dream Zwift set up that I've wanted to build
for a few years. And now we finally got it.
Lots of Zwift content coming up because full disclosure
Zwift is a new sponsor and we have a lot of really fun Zwift
content plans coming something like 20 inner roles
and 20 questions with Lucy Charles or Sarah True
or Tim Don or Jan Frodeno or Lionel Sanders.
So if you aren't already subscribed and you dig that,
hit the subscribe button below.
Hopefully you too can convince your spouses to take over
a corner of your living space with a toy.
Later trainiacs.