A Q&A with the welder behind popular YouTube channel Red Beard’s Garage

With more than 386,000 subscribers, it is safe to say Greg Davis and his Red Beard’s Garage YouTube channel has a large following.

The channel showcases Davis fabricating, customizing, and restoring mostly small vehicles ranging from go-karts to buggies to minibikes. Most of the work is done out of his shop in Sweetwater, Tenn.

It was not always like that for Davis. It all began the first time he built a go-kart for his daughter.

“I feel like God blessed me with my career,” Davis said.

Prior to Red Beard’s Garage, Davis worked in IT for Ford, teaching customers how to use the technology in their vehicles. That ability to teach turned into a blessing in disguise for Davis as he considered making how-to videos and pondered how to make a living on YouTube.

“These [vehicle] parts are complicated sometimes, and they weren't making it clear why to use this part over another part,” Davis said of watching some how-to videos. “I was frustrated in my shop. Why aren’t these people breaking this down?

“And that’s what got me started. I’m going to explain these parts in depth and show how to install them and do these how-to videos.”

The WELDER spoke with Davis about a number of topics, including Red Beard’s Garage, welding to an online audience, his work on a Harley-Davidson 883 off-road buggy and fabricating the chassis, and persevering through discouragement.

The WELDER: What do you remember about building your first go-kart?

Greg Davis: It was a kid’s one-seater, so we’re talking about 4 ft. long by 2 ft. wide. A very basic go-kart.

Greg Davis is the man behind Red Beard’s Garage, a YouTube channel with more than 384,000 subscribers. The channel’s content includes videos of Davis fabricating, customizing, and restoring go-karts, buggies, minibikes, and other small vehicles. Images: Red Beard’s Garage

It was super thrilling. I remember the excitement; I was just super pumped to get to the shop and work until midnight. At the time, we didn’t know what we were doing. Looking back at it now, I can do that build in a day. But it took me two, three weeks to finish that go-kart because we didn’t know what we were doing.

At the time, my daughter was probably 9 or 10. We didn’t have part sponsors, so we’d be sanding rusty axles to try to get them to slide back through the clapped-out bearings and stuff. It was a lot of good bonding time. I had never ridden a go-kart. It was very exciting to ride my first go-kart that I put together and not just one we bought at a store.

TW: Does Red Beard’s Garage still focus on go-karts?

Davis: No, we’ve transitioned away [from go-karts]. You keep growing and the sense of what you want to build keeps growing. Now we build basically homemade side-by-side [vehicles]. We'll do single-seater travel buggies and two-seaters. We're just building chassis from scratch and building these off-road buggies—a modern-day dune buggy, you may call it.

I'm into suspension and the geometry to figure out how to get the most travel without bumps. I really like designing chassis and making them look aggressive.

We still use go-kart engines on a lot of stuff because we still want to relate to the people. You can go buy a go-kart engine, depending on the size, for $100 to $800. We like the simplicity of a go-kart engine.

We still do go-karts and minibikes from time to time. We'll always do that stuff but it’s not our main focus now. Now we're teaching people to fabricate on a bigger level. I feel like that was the whole goal of our YouTube channel.

TW: How did you learn to weld?

Davis: Naturally, with go-karts, you’re going to get a junker that needs welding. I was hauling my stuff 35-40 minutes away to my brother’s house for him to weld because he’s been a master welder since high school. It would get so aggravating because I’d have to haul the trailer with the things, weld everything up, get home, and find out I’d forgotten to weld something that would hold the video back.

Then I was like, “OK, I got to learn how to weld.” So I bought a used Lincoln [Electric] welder for $100. You can actually see my very first weld on the YouTube channel. I converted [the welding machine] to run off gas because it was a flux-cored welder. I converted it to gas right off the bat because I knew I didn’t want to weld with flux-cored [wire] and started welding and teaching myself, and then it just escalated.

Davis is based out of his shop in Sweetwater, Tenn.

I felt like I took on MIG welding really fast. I did watch a couple of YouTube videos to find out the way to set up my machine. But I felt like I caught on real quick. I also taught myself how to TIG weld.

TW: You’ve brought up that you taught yourself a lot over the years. Where does that mindset come from?

Davis: We were always modifying our bikes growing up and then taking toys and stuff apart and putting them back together. I liked to reverse-engineer things when I was a kid, which a lot of kids do. I'd take electronics apart and put them back together. We'd make choppers out of our bicycles and stuff. We'd mess with any kind of junk we could find and modify.

TW: Did your brother and others help you improve as a welder?

Davis: He did with MIG welding. He actually TIG welds aluminum for a living but he helped me with MIG. I have a close friend who kind of coached me through TIG welding who builds crazy twin-turbo kits on Lamborghinis. I met him through YouTube. He wanted to build a titanium exhaust for one of our go-karts just because we helped him learn about go-karts to build for his kids. We became close friends and he taught me to TIG weld.

TW: You said you put your first weld on your channel. At the time, did you think that might have been a bad idea?

Davis: Oh, you always second-guess yourself. [That’s] the worst thing about this career and I don’t sugarcoat it.

I worked 8 a.m.-5 p.m. for Ford, would come home and spend two hours with my kids, and then work in the shop until 1 o’clock in the morning. You have to work extremely hard and then be judged on every aspect of everything you do. The judging never stops, no matter how good of a fabricator you become. People will judge your welds, and if it’s a certain weld where you have to do multiple passes to get the results you wanted, you might put a picture on Instagram of the first TIG weld pass, and there's still some passes to do, but you want to show the progress. People will correct you on everything that you're doing, even though you're not finished with it.

It is hard. Back then, when it was a smaller channel, there was less hate. There were less haters on the videos. But I think God has blessed me because still to this day we have really good commenters. We rarely get bad comments. I'd say one out of 30 will be negative.

When I did my first weld, people were like, “You need to slow down,” “up the amperage,” “slow down the wire speed.” I think I had my wire speed too high, so it was stuttering and pushing the gun back because it just didn’t have the amperage to melt that much wire. People were giving me good pointers, and it made me a better welder because I took what they said and put it to use.

Before Red Beard’s Garage became his full-time job, Davis worked in IT for Ford, teaching customers how to use the technology in their vehicles. He said that the ability to teach and explain has helped with his how-to videos.

TW: Do any of the projects you’ve worked on over the years stand out for you?

Davis: There’s two that stick out. One is the supercharged buggy that is still a work-in-progress. We never got it powder coated. It's sitting outside with a rusty chassis but won’t run. When it’s your own personal project, you kind of never finish it, you’re always tweaking it. That was the second chassis I’d ever built, and it’s got long travel. The first one we built we horribly failed on the front because we didn’t know all the geometry associated with it. But through that failure I taught myself to build them correctly, and now this second one had 15 in. of wheel travel with no bump steer.

The second project that I would say stands out the most to me is the SEMA Show build—the Harley 883 chassis. It was the pinnacle of my fabrication work. Everything in that chassis is 100% symmetrical, level; everything is TIG welded. It's the best chassis I've ever built ... it’s the height of my work. We were excited to get it back to the shop and finish it and powder coat it and do the first-ride video of it. The crazy thing is I built the entire chassis in three weeks by myself.

Normally, when you rush something it’s not the best, but that’s by far the best work I've ever done. I knew an audience would be seeing it [at SEMA]. YouTube is one thing, but here is something someone can walk up to and touch—I knew there’d be a lot of pressure.

TW: What advice do you have for someone working on vehicles, including go-karts or buggies?

Davis: I would think the biggest thing, the biggest killer, is discouragement. I used to be down on myself before I knew how to fabricate because it almost seemed impossible to achieve what I was trying to achieve. Nothing is impossible. I truly believe in my saying that if you can touch it, you can fix it. Never discourage yourself.

There is someone around you who wants you to succeed in what you’re doing, you’ve just got to find those people. Surround yourself with positive people and be positive. That’s the biggest thing. Try to find joy in what you’re doing.

Also, there's always a solution that might be way simpler than you ever imagine—you just need the tools to make that happen. That's where I was caught up at first. I would get caught up in something that, looking back, I see I could have solved in five minutes. But without that knowledge, I was completely lost and defeated in my shop. And then the whole world is watching me do this stuff and I didn't want to seem like a failure.

If you’re getting frustrated, walk away because it’s not going to help you fabricate better to keep grinding with a frustrated mind.

Slide Show | 5 Images