I started with cheap pre group coffee from the supermarket for less than £3 a bag and a chemex I picked up for £20. I now have four grinders, a bunch of pour over gear and an espresso machine (marax), worth several thousand. Plus a £80 a month fresh coffee bean habit.
Woodworking. You start with a few tools to fix things in your house, and suddenly, you got vintage handtools worth thousands of euros and you seriously speak of installing your “shop”.
Woodworking is extremely expensive and you don’t recognise it early on. Even if you don’t have vintage tools,etc. the sunken cost fallacy will fuck you over. And we are not even talking about expensive things like CNCs, tablesaws,etc.
And wood itself is expensive. My rather mediocre wood storage was ruined by flooding recently and the damage is way beyond 2k. Just fucking wood. Not even expensive wood. Normal wood.
Is it that expensive though? My dad has a table saw for 800 bucks, wuth the table allowing to put a mill tgat he got for maybe 400 bucks. The rest around is some general tools, a quality drill and drill stand, an air filter and a self made cyclone box for the vacuum. Top it off with some self made helpers like a a sledge for the table saw. The whole ordeal is not more than 4-5k and tgere is almost nothing he cannot do by himself now.
CNC systems are hardly needed for non professionals.
There are always different levels how deep you go in,but usually you also have a router or router table (between 0,5-1k including bits), a sander (0,5k with sanding paper), the workbench (around 1-4k), etc.
5k for just the basics is very reasonable and that misses the main thing: The bloody wood. Wood has become extremely expensive over the years, especially since the war started and if you do something that keeps you occupied 8h a week it will easily 1-2k of wood and other small stuff per year.
That is then around 10k for 5y of the hobby + optimistically speaking.
I wouldn’t consider the wood as costs so easily. For instance we made furniture ourselves, like a bed, shelves, closets, stuff in the garden… If we would have bought the things instead, it would have been more expensive than the wood and other materials that went into it.
Of course the labor in this case is hobby, as it isnt competitive, but then again we got useful high quality stuff out of it, that will last a lifetime.
Depends on the furniture you buy,surely, but at least I have not been able to produce any furniture cheaper (just material costs) vs. factory build simply because they can cut more corners/get cheaper materials/can use techniques that would need more sophisticated equipment than I can.
Unless you compare it to massively and individually build carpenter furniture I always am more expensive (okay it’s usually more solid and individual, though)
Yes you’re right. The bed for instance was 300 € material costs using 27mm glued wood beech, wher you can buy stuff using plywood for cheaper. But it looks much better and will last much longer.
So in terms of quality it is somewhere in between factory and carpenter buildt. For furniture it is well worth it imo. and i couldn’t find quality stuff for less than the associated material costs. Yet you can find a lot of plywood furniture that is way to overprized because “designer” or whatever.
I bought a vinyl copy of Beggars’ Banquet by the Rolling Stones for 50p despite not having a record player. Fast forward six years and I now have a full stereo system, a collection worth over £10k and regularly order limited edition albums from small bands costing me large amounts each time. Send help.
That’s only my 30’s which is the last 4 years. Hobbies for me are normally short and fierce obsessions when I start, they eventually slow down into a more ‘normal’ pasttime that I do sometimes to past the time.
LoL I feel that so hard but I’m way to cheap and frugal so everything I do is done used and on a budget to keep me from going overboard so I generally only end up spending a couple hundred max before it turns into a part-time that I pull out on occasion while looking for something to distract me from impending doomerism
I make a cross between dioramas and video games. It started out as a test to see if I could make something and now I am all in. It’s all I want to work on. I have spent so much money on old lcd screens
Was supposed to be the cheapest way to get exercise. You can do it right from your front door, no gym subscriptions, no specialized equipment (some people will tell you you don’t even need shoes), and it’s far and away the best time-value exercise I’ve ever found. You can get away with like 20 minutes 3-4 times a week and be doing great.
Well, turns out I love running and I love distance running so I’m now putting up enough miles to need new shoes 2-3 times a year, a nice Garmin smart watch and heart rate monitor to track my progress, sign-ups for several long-distance races each year, shorts, socks, you get the picture.
Could I do it cheaper? Yeah. But at the end of the day it’s a hobby and I like it
The races are so expensive! I can’t justify signing into one yet, I’m ready to run a half marathon but I’ll wait until I can run a nice full marathon since it’s almost the same price
They can be wildly expensive, and some truly aren’t worth it. I almost always opt to donate the shirt I get because frankly I’m a little picky about my gear and they’re rarely good quality, but even beyond that I’ve run a few where the race coordinators just haven’t got a clue how to host a race and I really start to question why I even paid to register at all.
Fortunately I’ve found an amazing local company that hosts trail runs and is managed by a former ultramarathoner and they’re the best races I’ve been a part of. I also feel good about paying a local small business.
You realize it’s an addiction when you intend to do 5k. Realize after that Strava didn’t work properly on your watch and then you end up doing a second 5k because the first 5k didn’t count.
I felt the same way about running until I started getting into triathlons. Watch out for that trap; races are at least $200 each, and road bikes ain’t cheap!
I already have a lovely gravel bike that I am comfortable making my Last Bike Ever ™. I mean the frame is great but I’ve been looking at upgrading the group set… It’s cheaper if I do the work myself!
I’m just getting into cycling and I’m super lucky to have gotten my dad’s old tri bike for free. He had it all kitted out and it’s pretty well perfect for me. It was in pristine shape until I wrecked it a couple times. One of them requiring 24 stitches.
So I guess that’s the most expensive hobby I’ve had - not in terms of financial cost, but definitely in terms of blood drawn!
Protip if you’re not used to race bikes: they can be a lot twitchier than you might be used to!
Oh yeah, forgot about that one. You thought you just needed one pair of shoes? Well, no I need a different pair for trail running and road running. And it gets cold here and I like to run in the winter so that’s a whole other set of clothing I gotta have. And let’s don’t even get started talking about how the grocery bill gets hiked up during the training cycle…
I was running for a couple of years , and my knee started to give me problems.
I went to an orthopedic Dr, and his advice was to take up swimming and if I wanted to keep running that I should hold on to his business card because someone needed to pay for his kids’ college.
I stopped running soon after and avoided surgery for a decade, but it still caught up with me. Knees are definitely cheap with for-profit healthcare.
This is why shoes these days are super engineered cushions essentially. Don’t skimp on shoes if you’re young and reading this, buy the good shit because it’s good (and usually it’s more expensive). $200 now saves thousands in replacements and tons of pain along the way.
Used to homebrew. At first I thought it’d be cheaper than buying my own beer but it quickly ratcheted-up with grain mills, larger and larger pots and burners, finding places to store the fermenting/aging beer, finding time to brew, finding time to bottle/keg, the clean-up and mess…and, in certain cases, you go through the whole process to find an entire batch has been ruined.
As an alternative view, I homebrew and while the cost to get in can be a bit steep, the long term costs are actually pretty good. I looked at the cost to get equipment as a loss and just wrote it off. Electronic kettle and automation was pricey, but luckily I was able to have some costs offset with work benefits. Realistically though, in actual ingredients, between $30-50 USD for 5 gallons of beer and about 8 hours total of time for cleaning, brewing, fermenting and packaging, it’s not too bad.
I tend to be very meticulous though with my brew process, so I haven’t lost a batch, at least not due to contamination. I’ve had some beers that weren’t great, but when you put it in perspective, a 12 ounce serving probably cost me about $0.50 - 1.00. Comparatively, while not great, it was still drinkable and as good as anything I could get for that price.
Being able to make decent sized quantities of good beer to take to parties, give as gifts, and just have on hand really diminishes the hit of the cost of equipment. I feel like it’s been worth it.
See if there’s a homebrew club in your area that runs bulk buys, you can drop your per-batch price by a fair amount with buying ingredients in bulk. Un-milled grains last a long time if stored properly, hops can be stored in the freezer and I’ve used them up to a year after opening without a significant drop in quality. Same goes for yeast if you get dry. I have a 500g bag of US-04 that is over a year old and still ferments just fine, I transferred it to a mason jar and keep it in the coldest part of my fridge. I was able to drop my per-batch cost to around $20 CAD or less for most beers that I brew, and having the ingredients on-hand means I can brew whenever I feel like it.
$20 CAD for a brew!!! That’s really impressive and an amazing value. We do have a great local homebrew scene here and our local suppliers offer pretty good value for equipment and supplies. I probably could get similar costs as well. Unfortunately like the OP in the thread I don’t have the kind of space for bulk grain and milling machines or other bulk storage. Being in an apartment has it’s limits and Ive pretty much hit them. I’m satisfied with my cost efficiency even knowing it could be better under different circumstances.
Cool to hear that you have great cost efficiency! That’s awesome to see. Thanks for sharing!
I enjoy VR games, but I can’t get into VR racing. I can’t see the wheel, the shifter so it’s hard to enjoy immersion when I had to fumbling to find a grip. I can’t see the control buttons so navigating the menu is a pain in the rear end.
Similarly I lose immersion when I’m going into a corner and I struggle to see the car on my inside. That’s why I want to try VR.
I don’t play with a shifter, just paddles on the wheel (driving F4 in iracing), so I don’t think I’d have any trouble with where the controls are. Maybe the Apple Vision Pro will end up being the best racing headset though and solve your problem.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games.
I bought Mutant Year Zero in 2015 thinking “Ah, this will give me countless hours of play! I can make my own adventures and stuff!”
Now, my shelf is buckling after trying a hundred different games and supplements, and getting addicted to pretty books.
Currently, my favorite game of all time is Delta Green. Investigative horror mystery. Amazingly horrific scenarios (adventures) with True Detective season one level of masterful writing.
I love how TTRPGs are the model for having a quality product means people will buy it. It’s not difficult to pirate everything, and many systems are just flat out free. And yet I buy most of it.
You should still go for it though! You can contact people on radio, you don’t need to necessarily have anyone local join you to achieve that. At most times of the day, there are hundreds of radio contacts being made. Now actually receiving those, and reaching those stations yourself as well in order to make a contact, that’s the challenge. And there are many different ways to achieve that with different gear on different frequencies in all sorts of different conditions. You can do much more than just a bit higher power walkie-talkie, you can reach the other side of the world if you go at it well :).
My main motivation was game coordination around our camp. We didn’t have decent phone coverage until recently and phones aren’t practical for it.
As for reaching and connecting to other people it is fun but I don’t want to do it alone. It is better to have someone to share this hobby. I am homebrewer and my friends can at least enjoy my beer. This wouldn’t bring that enjoyment.
One option is to see if there’s any GMRS repeaters, and especially any repeater groups, in your area. The license is cheap and you can still go 50w with it, but it’s not as popular as the HAM bands. There’s a few really good, but simple enough, mobile stations. Pick up a better antenna (height is king!), and you’ll be able to listen & talk with the locals.
I’m in the beginnings…and yes, with two Baofeng handhelds lol. Then I got a little SDR kit for receiving. Of course I also needed some cable adapters and ferrite cores, while I was at it. Oh, and the ARRL license manual to study for my technician license (I knew nothing about amateur radio prior to this rabbit hole, so it was actually really interesting to read)
Was supposed to have my technician license already, but life got a little chaotic. Was passing all the practice exams easy and just needed to sign up for the real exam. Hoping to get it done soon, but I have to brush back up a little. Then I’m hoping to move quickly to my general class, while the basics are still fresh.
Even started learning morse code and was getting better at it. Had the alphabet and numbers, could read it just fine, but the listening is what’s hard… but still kinda fun. All the Q-codes and slang are what I think will take the longest if I really start getting into CW, but I know that’ll be time/experience more than anything
But for now, I just listen-in on my SDR around my area when I can, and have maybe looked into how to grab some NOAA satellite images lol
So yeah, I can see this becoming a bit of a thing for me, because I keep learning more and more, and it all just seems so cool to me. Using the ionosphere to propagate, tropospheric ducting, or even using freaking meteor scatter! So much cooler than I ever thought when I knew nothing
I used to be there… now I’ve got three sets of shelves from Costco full up of boxes, bins, trays, tools, bits, and bobs. Finding used electronics bench devices like power supplies, multimeters, oscopes, and soldering stations is an ongoing effort to do at a reasonable price point.
Arduino and hobby electronics. It started out as a continuous loop pad dye machine to save me having to dye fabric by hand, strictly mechanical, but then I wanted to automate adding the chemicals at the right times. Then it was keeping the dye liquor a consistent temperature. Then it was draining the trough automatically. Then I figured out I could design my own PCBs and have them fabricated. It just keeps going…
I’d like to know more about this. I’m trying to get into electronics and hardware automation but feel overwhelmed since I don’t have any idea about electrical engineering
Honestly my recommendation would be to start off with some microcontrollers/Raspberry Pi and some breadboards and go from there. That way you can uhhh trial and error your way to something that works and worry about the “engineering” part later, when you have gotten your feet wet :D There are some simple Arduino starter kits for example that give you the basic things + a bunch of sensors and motors to play with. I got started myself with the Elegoo Arduino Starter Kit (~50€). Along the way it’s probably going to be helpful to look up some course on electronics basics, specifically digital circuits and then analog circuits if you’re feeling adventurous.
Best piece of advice I can give about learning anything (that doesn’t involve risk of injury): don’t try to learn everything there is to learn. Decide what you want to do and learn what you need to do that. Tell me something you’d be interested in doing…
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