Not really. The Rode Videomic being a shotgun is unlikely to help in his situation.
There's enough going on with the workbench and machinery to deflect sound around the room, and a decent shotgun would improve the audio here. The subject is sitting in a machine shop, of course there's going to be noise. It's not perfect, of course, and a good lav (countryman b6, for example) run to a Zoom would be even better. But that blows his budget right out of the water.
But I personally wouldn't recommend any Azden product to be used professionally, ever. I've been forced to use them before, and it was a nightmare. Horribly thin sound, poor range on receivers, etc. Not worth the savings in my opinion.
My honest, really really real recommendation for BGray would be to go with whatever sub-$100 lav makes him happy, run Tragic Lantern for full manual audio control, and deal with the fact that recording the best audio requires working after 5 pm. This, of course, is why I don't have too many friends.

/zombiethread