Would I be correct that this hobby, if it’s not just having a nice thing for everyday use, does it eventually lead into: calligraphy, fancy stationary, special vellum papers, custom wax stamp seal kits, grinding your own ink, etc?
I like to repair and restore broken vintage audio gear.
“Wow, this 60’s Sansui amp and those 70’s AR speakers are practically free! I already have all the tools I need to repair them, it’ll be fun and cheap. When I get these restored, I won’t need anything else ever again!”
Started out with a raspberry pi several years ago. Got my feet wet with entry level, beginner friendly NAS prebuilds. Hunted for recycled computer parts. Now searching for and actively acquiring enterprise gear that is making a massive dent in my wallet.
Serverpartdeals.com for refurbished HDDs. Fractal define R5 case for the 6 14 TB HDDs and 2 SSDs for cache, a uUSB thumb drive to run unraid. Some ram, a PSU, a Mobo, and a very old quadro GPU, only a couple grand in parts and your obsession is fed, for now.
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 thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you’ve got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you’ve got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least – or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.
I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you’re the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.
This stuff absolutely doesn’t need to be expensive. I was doing electronics for a long time now. I guess I am at professional level but I never got regular 9-5 job doing electronics, I was always doing odd jobs like repair, design, construction.
I only recently got modern tools for this. For years my books, parts, tools and methods were mostly from 70s/80s that I got from various public dumps. That was 10 years ago though, now these places are closed.
If you need to do something really fast and cheap - draw a pcb with sharpie and use ferric chloride to etch it. Modern oscilloscope is a luxury. Since I was working mainly with audio stuff I had a diy amplifier with a speaker connected to it that I used to listen to waveforms.
A lot of tools can made by hand too. There is a ton of old projects for old atmega microcontrollers. One of the best projects like this was sold as generic chinese made “multipurpose tester” which - last time I checked - was not properly designed when looking at the original. Original would this one - www.mikrocontroller.net/…/AVR_TransistortesterBut everything necessary for this project is here - github.com/svn2github/transistortester/…/master
Ah, some context – I live in Vietnam. We don’t get tools or books from the 70’s and 80s from the trash. New Chinese stuff is pretty good and not a fortune, although at the start I really couldn’t afford even that. I was making like 240 US dollars a month in those days, and working 60 hours a week, so I had no free time to do labor-intensive things (or pursue hobbies at all, really). That’s why I wanted tools so much I suppose : to do fewer labor intensive things so I could use my mind more.
AVRs are my favorite chips! I use the Attiny10 all the time (USD 0.36 per chip). AVRs have really nice assembly language and datasheets, they are a joy to work with! Attiny10 is maybe a bit difficult to do with the sharpie method. I bet you could with some practice and a very fine pen though.
I etch PCBs by hand at home sometimes these days, because I almost exclusively use SMT. I can usually do a board start to finish in 45 minutes, for iterating rapidly a few times before being satisfied with it. Toner transfer works really well on a gas stove + a big metal plate! However, I can also get boards made at a factory for 15-20$ with a 3 week lead time. That’s usually much cheaper than a few 45 minute runs, so recently I’ve just been sending it off to the factory without etching + testing first.
The main cost is time, overall. I’m not wealthy, time is still super expensive to me right now, I’m in the finishing steps of bootstrapping myself out of poverty. An engineering company was a tool to monetize my interests, so that I could pursue a middle class life, without giving up the control I insist on having over my time and work. Really, it was the only way I could have pursued all this tech stuff at all.
Actual physical tools to do more work faster and more reliably was also really important. Having a company also gives me a 30% discount on tools – no 10% VAT, and no 20% corporate income tax on the amount of profits it ate up (only if I’m legitimately using it for client work though).
Have you tried 3D printing enclosures? There’s a bit of up front cost if you don’t have a printer already, but after that the material costs are pretty cheap. It’s really cool to be able to make a custom enclosure with all the cutouts, integrated standoffs, panel markings, etc all in a single print.
Yeah, I’ve tried that! It was more of a journey making my work more presentable, than it was making it more functional, if we’re being honest.
I invested some proceeds from an early client work to buy an SLA printer. It uses acrylic, with good dimensional accuracy, but it’s very brittle. It was a painful expense at the time, nearly 800$.
I considered it a marketing cost – I can’t present things to clients with wires hanging out. Prototypes have to look awesome. I also sometimes use it to print basic clockwork, board game pieces, whatever I might personally consider fun. Mostly client cases though. I’ve had very good success with black plastic, which I polish down to a very smooth matte finish using fine emery paper soaked in water. I also emboss the client’s logo on the case. I rarely paint it, but do sometimes add labels.
Another good investment was a decent used DSLR (135$) and some antique lenses (because they were very cheap and better than midrange modern ones). When I deliver physical prototypes, I also deliver product shots good enough to use professionally e.g. for marketing or to show the CEO / investors. A high-end ancient macro lens cost me 10$ and has paid itself off many times.
Finally, I also bought a rugged waterproof plastic suitcase filled with foam. Similar to a “pelican case”. These are used to deliver prototypes to meetings and demonstrations.
I would classify this as ‘theater’ more than ‘technology’ – but generally the management understands the former better, and they are the ones making purchasing decisions. So I give them a show, and the detailed documentation goes to the engineers only.
For my own stuff, I design it to fit in standard engineering enclosures. One of the local retailers has a quite good selection of aluminium and ABS ones. This is much more robust than any form of 3D printing I have access to (and it’s cheap – a nice ABS box starts at like USD 0.50). FDM printing would be OK, but I don’t have the budget or space (actually space is the expensive thing in Asia) for a second printer.
The other thing I like doing for my own stuff is using solid and thick brass sheets, for no reason at all. Family ancestral shrines use a lot of brass here, so it’s less expensive here. It’s heavy, and chromed industrial buttons on brass panels looks glorious. Makes for great robots too. At least when I have an extra 15$ to spend (I’m quite stingy – being poor in the past will do that to you).
Oh boy, where do I even start. I guess we should first have a minute of silence for my wallet…
Fixing old computers
In high school, I agreed to take the decommisioned PCs home. They were in various states of not working, I diagnosed the problems, bought parts, upgraded and fixed them all. I now had a ton of relatively old but reliable computers. What’s the logical next step?
Home server room (homelab).
I live in a flat with a giant basement, so it’s full of these old PCs and servers. I needed a server rack, switches, cabling, the whole nine yards.
Photography
New lenses and filters constantly bought. Sometimes a new camera body. This is my most expensive hobby by far, but I take care of the lenses so they at least hold value, unlike the PCs :)
+1 for photography it’s addicting to buy new gear lol
I started with a relatively cheap Lumix g95 ($700) m43 camera thinking it would have everything I need. But for video I wanted slow mo. It had slow mo but the bit rate was horrendous. At the time I had no idea and none of the information online told you this at all. It was just a check mark ✓ High Frame rate and I had no idea how important bit rate was. Bought better lenses (approx 1200$) because I wanted depth of field and lower light performance. Which m43 just couldn’t provide, but I really wouldn’t have known how much it couldn’t provide it. I trudged on.
Upgraded to GH5 (800$ on offer up), same lenses but much better sensor, higher frame rates, 4k support, better video codex’s. Still had issues with low light and depth of field. Oh yeah and to top it off all Lumix cameras have terrible auto focus. Which is only amplified by my yearning to have lower depth of field, cause more of the picture is out of focus. Now I want to pull the cord and buy a full frame sony camera (2500$ + another $2500 in lenses). I still think GH5 is a great camera and got good use out of it
I have a collection of various Zeiss lenses, because my proffesional photographer friend told me he enjoys them. They’re amazing, but I refuse to even share how much I paid for them, since I’d probably cry :D I also have a few from various brands like Canon, Sigma, etc.
In terms of cameras, I always bought a new one, used it for a while, sold it and bought a new one. I settled on the Canon 1DX Mark III in the end, I think I’ll use this one until it dies.
That basement full of old pcs and servers… Checked some models against ebay?
I bought a pallet of “computers” from a local agricultural auction for £1 based on nothing but that one word description. Turns out one was a fully working PS/2 with monitor and keyboard. The keyboard alone sold for £80, and I made over £200 on the lot and got some great messages from the buyers who were really pleased to find one.
I never did, really. I don’t have anything special in there, just some Dell Optiplexes and HP stuff… I wanted to sell them but once I found out I’d maybe get 20€ a piece, I decided to keep them and try out new software on them, use them for parts, etc.
I think audio, headphones, amps, all this stuff. Microphones, recorders, physical mixing gear. If I would go in that direction, I would need a seperate room and loots of money
My humble used office desktop turned NAS quickly became a dual-processor, 64GB ECC machine with more storage and processing power than I’ll probably ever need.
Getting back into PC gaming after buying my friends old 300 euro gaming PC. I’m looking to upgrade and every little bit faster is only a little bit extra, so a 100 euro upgrade turned to a 120 euro upgrade, then a 150 euro upgrade to… i don’t want to say how much i spent…
The initial investment for espresso is pretty steep, but I think it’s well worth it. There’s something so satisfying about making your own coffee drinks yourself. And if you think about it, you’ll probably drink coffee for the rest of your life, so you’ll end up breaking even eventually.
A good pair of running shoes will cost you between £100 and £200. You might decide to get a rotation of shoes for different types of run. Maybe a race day shoe, a fast training shoe, and a slower recovery show. So that could set you back a few hundred.
I’ve been pretty good to be honest. I’ve got 2 active pairs both of which I got on sale for £80.
Just to reinforce your point, the difference between a cheap running shoe and an expensive running shoe is incredible. When I first started running a few years ago, I was using a very old pair of running shoes I’ve had for a long time. I’ve since been sticking with the New Balance Fresh Foam X 880s (because I have very wide feet and NB seems like the only brand that actually makes their best running shoes in 4E) and it’s like running on a cloud.
And then there’s also the Garmin watch that cost $300 (that I’m now stupidly considering upgrading to the new $600 Forerunner 965), the $120 HRM Pro chest strap, the $3000 Nordic Track x22i for indoor runs I got lightly used on Craigslist for a steal at $900, etc.
And then there’s the races where you’re spending $40, $50, $100+ depending on whether it’s a 5K or 10K or half-marathon. And good running clothes are pricey too.
I’m on week 5 of doing couch to 5k, but using a pair of generic trainers I bought years ago. How much of a difference does a pair of running trainers make?
Having shoes designed for running will make a big difference. You don’t need to spend a lot to get some half decent ones, but they make running a much more pleasant experience.
My wife and I started playing Disc Golf as an “inexpensive” and more accessible option to traditional golf with a started set of cheap discs off Amazon. Carts bags, and DOZENS of discs later…$$$
Basically, if its either broken but good enough condition I may restore it and find a niche use for it. The helmets are mostly used for gags with my friends and the great coat is new enough that I may actually use it if its windy enough.
Check out the Discovery Channel tv show, Combat Dealers. I’m guessing basically that – learning old history, topping one’s collection with the most obscurest\rarest item, etc.
Thanks for the tips. In Helsinki, my friend actually just buys the disc version of PS5 and rents the discs for free in the library. We have to finish a disc in 2 weeks though (unless we can extend it).
With time I’ve learned that video games are probably the cheapest hobby I have. I literally had a minor crisis when my computer died and I started crunching numbers on switching hobbies temporarily and found the cost of a new computer was cheaper especially once I took into account the already sunk cost of my game library
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