We were sitting in the Coastal Inn in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, on Day 1 of an early-season tour. As usual, I’d been fidgeting with my cheap foam earplugs all day; I couldn’t find the good, custom-molded set I’d bought few years earlier. And then I remembered that when I’d left, I’d thrown the Decibullz DIY custom-mold earplugs into my bag; it was time to get busy and make them fit! Here’s how that worked out.

A DIY solution

For years, I’ve used the Big Ears earplugs that you see sold at motorcycle shows. You know the type; you go to the booth, they squeeze some goop in your ears, and after a few minutes, it hardens into roughly the shape of your auditory canal.

Earplugs like this aren’t quite as expensive as those made by an audiologist, and a lot of people say they aren’t quite as effective either, but I have typically found them to have the best noise reduction. But what happens if you lose one or both of them, and there’s no upcoming motorcycle show to get a replacement set?

Log on to Amazon, and you can find DIY equivalents, similar to the earplugs that used to be advertised in those small ads in the back pages of newsstand moto mags. In late 2023, I’d bought a set of Decibullz, with a claimed NRR of 31 decibels. I’d paid $27ish CAD; I think the price has risen about ten bucks since.

The earplugs ship with multiple tips, to get a good internal fit to your ear canal once the main section is molded.

According to their marketing blurb, the buyer can easily get a perfect custom fit, offering superior noise isolation, etc., etc., etc.. Well of course they’d say that. But the description of the custom-fit process sounded simple enough:

Simply heat the Decibullz thermoplastic molds in boiling water, let them cool for a bit, and shape them to your ears. That’s it, and if you don’t get the perfect fit the first time Decibullz are the only custom earplugs that are re-moldable.

With reckless abandon, I splurged the $27 plus tax and put in the order. It was worth a try. They showed up a few days later, and I totally forgot about them until I was packing for that spring moto ride, and threw the package in my tankbag.

Molding the earplugs

So, there I was in a motel room with custom-fit earplugs that hadn’t been custom-fitted before I left. I needed them for the next day’s ride, so I had to come up with a solution.

The answer was: Take one of the coffee cups from the room’s table, fill it with water and put it in the microwave. That heated the water enough that I was able to throw the earplugs in one at a time, and push them into my ears for fitting.

You can see how the design works; there’s an internal core to the plug with the moldable material fitting around it. Then there are interchangeable tips that fit the end of the plug to your ear.

The Decibullz claim that these plugs are re-shapeable is correct; on one of the plugs, I noticed I hadn’t got the fit quite right, and I was able to warm it up again and get it better-molded to my ear’s shape. However, I do think that this one is not quite as noise-tight as the other.

Honestly, this was an incredibly easy process; I think that a lot of motorcyclists might be put off by the DIY factor, but it’s almost no hassle at all, considering I was able to do it in a motel room with a microwave and a coffee cup.

How they worked out

I used the earplugs through thousands of kilometers over that weekend and over the months since. I’m very happy with their performance.

I don’t think these earplugs offer the same noise reduction as my Big Ear plugs, but it’s pretty close, and if I reheated them and tweaked the mold, I might be able to improve them a bit.

The molded black section of the earplug is not as soft as my Big Ear custom-molded plugs, but it didn’t bother me. Photo: Zac Kurylyk

But as they are, they’re more than good enough. They offer far better protection than an ill-fitting one-size-fits-nobody earplug from Wal-Mart, and they even seem to offer a bit more noise reduction than Loop earplugs (more on them in a future review). I don’t use the Decibullz on every motorcycle trip; the Loops are my go-to. But the Decibullz are comfortable for a day’s ride of reasonable length, despite their non-cushy molded part; they don’t fall out, or rotate in place, or otherwise become dislodged.

With all this in mind, I think these are a good buy for the price. If you don’t get the fit quite right, you can re-shape them; if you don’t like them after that, well, you’re only out a few bucks. On my part, I wish I’d known about these earplugs years ago. They would have saved me a decade of hearing damage on the bike.