Here's something I found interesting. Yesterday my wife and I decided to double up on my padded flooring in the "gymnasium", which had grown from 8'X8' (pictured in the last post) to 8'X10' a couple days back already. Now the plan is to go to 10'X16' when it's set up, that way we can work around each other and have room to store equipment on the mats rather than on the concrete. Despite being pretty much a disorganized mess down there, that drives my wife way more nuts than it does me (I can be quite the slob), we've got plenty of room in the basement.
I was planning on laying down the new tiles and hooking them up to the old tiles today. They wouldn't fit the older tiles. First thought that pops in my head is "man, Harbor Freight has some quality control issues with this stuff", then I started noticing all of the old pieces fit each other, all of the new pieces fit each other, but the older pieces are slightly darker and slightly smaller than the new pieces.
It dawned on me that the new foam pieces have been sitting inside the house in the upper 70s and the stuff I laid down a few days back has been laying on a concrete floor that's closer to 60 degrees or so. That's a scenario that's prime for expansion/contraction of some materials. I looked it up and EVA foam is one of those things that can expand or contract depending on the temperature. As far as the color difference goes, this stuff seems to off gas for a couple of days (there is a smell to it initially) after coming out of the package wrapping. That's my theory at least, could be wrong.....
...A day later.... the foam hasn't shrunk at all and after some internet sleuthing, it's sort of a quality control issue, but sort of not... A lot of big companies often use multiple suppliers for their product. As it turns out, I was looking at the packaging and finally realized that while everything looked the same at quick glance, even the item numbers were the same, the UPC codes were different. Not just the last few numbers, but the first 9 numbers as well. The first 6-9 numbers of a UPC code are assigned to manufacturers, so apparently Harbor Freight uses more than one manufacturer to provide their anti-fatigue mats.
I guess in an ideal world Harbor freight would demand that each of their providers would manufacture them identical product, but that's not always realistic. Oh well, time to return some stuff... I ended up with 7 of the smaller mat packages and 3 of the larger mat packages. In an ideal world I'd return the 3 larger sets and be able to link everything together, but the local store is out of the smaller mats. Rather than making phone calls and driving to other cities to get a matching set, I decided to go the path of least resistance and return two sets of the smaller mats and go with a roughly 8'X10' foot section of the smaller mats and a roughly 8'X10' section of the larger mats. Guess I could of returned all of the smaller ones and gone with the larger mats, but I've already had stuff stacked on them and caused a bit of damage (indentations and one small tear) to it and I just don't fell right about returning stuff I've already damaged/altered. This stuff was so cheap I don't really care about the disparity in sizes of the two sections, it's adequate for my purposes. If I had been spending substantially more, which is easy to do on gym flooring, I'd have probably started over from scratch and ordered something that would be perfect.
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