What’s good, everybody?

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Greetings and salutations!

I hope you all have had a happy holidays and a fantastic start to the new year! There is a lot of things that have happened and that are in the works, I don’t know where to begin, so like always I will just dive right into it!

Unless you have been living under a rock (and that is possible, the world has been crazy lately), you might have seen or heard about the uproar on YouTube. I won’t delve into the specifics of the situation, but YouTube decided to change the requirements for joining its monitization program. The requirement before the change was to have 10,000 lifetime views on your channel, which is a bit of work, but not unobtainable (yours truly hit that mark in December, yay me!). Now the requirement is 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of viewed time in 12 months, which is a bit of work for the smaller channels to acquire. When the news broke, I admit, I was pretty peeved off. Seeing as I had just reached the previous requirement, I felt like the goalposts were moved even further ahead. I seriously started asking myself, did I really want to continue on YouTube. I had to take a couple days and remind myself why I started doing this in the first place. I didn’t do it to become internet famous and rich, I did it because I enjoy working on my car and wanted to share my passion with other like minded individuals. It would be nice to make “something”, camera equipment and website hosting isn’t exactly free, but I wasn’t making anything before, so I realized that I really hadn’t lost anything by YouTube changing the rules.

What the situation did do, was jump start ideas I have had about offering some kind of Five Five Garage swag that I could offer to help me keep the lights on. One of the ideas that I am going to offer soon is the Five Five Garage window decals that I have been teasing on Instagram (you haven’t been following my Instagram account? You are missing out!). I also have some hush hush secret project stuff I am working on, but that won’t be revealed until a much later time. Best way to stay in the loop, is to keep checking here and on my Instagram, I post things there that don’t always end up in videos.

I have decided to expand the content on the channel and website, I have other vehicles but the only one that has been seen so far is the Mazdaspeed 3. So I have decided to start covering some of the mods I have made to my 2003 Chevy Trailblazer, which will be referred to from now as #projecttrailbastard. So cool it even has its own hashtag! I have created a page over at Wheelwell (www.wheelwell.com), just search for FiveFiveGarage. There are comprehensive lists of the parts and modifications I have done to my Mazdaspeed 3 #projectrocket, #projecttrailbastard, and even my Honda CBR1000RR!  As the weather begins to warm up, I will start covering some maintenance videos on my CBR as I get it ready to ride,  #projectrocket is going to FINALLY get a downpipe and some other bits so I can begin the tuning process this summer!

2018 is going to be a busy year for me. I have a lot of irons in the fire, and a lot of cool and interesting things to share on my channel. I hope you all come along for the ride!

-Randy