Probs low hanging fruit for this thread, but vinyl collecting.
Started around 2011 by going to charity shops and second hand stores to find bargains. I used to be able to spend £10 a week and get 3/4 new (to me) records. Some were great ,some were trash, but that was the fun!
Then I started getting specific records, building towards band discographies… next thing I know, I’m dropping £25 per record for two bootleg records that were definitely not worth the price. Was a watershed moment and one that made me take a step back.
Ticked over for a year or two, next thing I know vinyl records are now in Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Every new release comes on vinyl, and they’re now £25+. Charity shops are now just full of junk vinyl, and all the second hand stores now charge £25+ because their pressings are “original”… all the fun is now gone.
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.
Here I am thinking “I need to get more active and it’ll be fun to do stuff with my best bud Link” (Link is a 4 year old golden retriever)
Starts with basic training obedience classes, no biggy. Then they offer Rally classes, which is basically obedience plus some fun stuff, cool, I’ll take that class. Oh, I can get a cool title for him? Sure, we already trained him, why not! Ok he needs 3 successful runs, and each run attempt is $25…? k…
Rally Novice acquired…fun but… Was that really worth 150 for the class + $75 for the three runs? …sure whatever
Ooooo agility sounds fun! Let’s do that! $150 for a 6 week session, that’s not bad! 6 months and many sessions later + buying practice equipment… I’m officially poor. My dog is a happy boy, and I’m more active, but FML this is a rabbit hole lol
We’re having a lot of fun, and my dog is a happier more obedient boy, but man was I not expecting the crazy expense. Those people with the dogs that have a bazillion titles and letters after their names? They’ve spent a literal fortune on that dog. It’s absolutely mind boggling.
From the Canine Competition universe… confirming fortune spent on doggos. I definitely did not spend 4 figures on entries fees for 3 dogs in a multitude of sports in one weekend… ~
I bought a kit that included a reasonably sized 360° magnet, rope, grappling hook and protective cover for about £120 thinking that it would be good enough to keep me satisfied for a while.
After my first trip out and having to carry a load of scrap metal about a mile back to the car, I bought a cart for £80 so I could cart it all back instead. After having to use my car to pull my magnet out of the harbour on Saturday I’ve bought a cheap winch and a tow rope to anchor it to things for £25 for when it gets stuck somewhere I can’t use my car.
And of course I wanted a bigger magnet almost immediately, but I’ve managed to hold off on that so far. Saying that it’s fairly likely I will get an upgrade from Bondi magnets when the site launches as long as the price is competitive with Magnetar (I suspect it’s a partnership and the magnets will be identical, but we’ll see)
I don’t know, I didn’t pull the object out with it. I’m guessing it got caught on something large and got wedged in so I couldn’t just overcome the force of the magnet to get it off. Could have been something huge and magnetic, or could’ve just been stuck between rocks. I was just happy to not lose my magnet
I started getting invested in a TCG (Digimon) for the first time ever a couple months ago (magic, YGO, pokemon etc. never did it for me before).
One of the selling points (at least currently) is that most decks are fairly affordable (less than 50 bucks affordable) and viable and even the very competitive decks shouldn’t set you back much (with less than 100 bucks you can easily make a top tier tournament-viable deck) .
Problem is I really started digging lots of different decks and discovering new favorite digimon and how they play and now I’m several hundreds of dollars of investment in both in cards and accessories (not even counting merch…).
I regret nothing though. It has helped me get out of the house (I work remote) and interact with people which has been very good for my mental health, and it gave me a way to revive some of my childhood nostalgia.
I’ve never been into TCG’s, but just wanted to say how back when the Pokemon and Digimon TV shows were first out, I was way more into Digimon. I do have some cards from back then but not sure if they’re even legit game cards. I only ever met two other people that watched Digimon (one was kind enough to lend me the first movie on VHS) but basically everyone has seen Pokemon in some form.
If your cards look like this then they are legit game cards but from the old Digimon TCG that was discontinued several years ago. The current TCG was released in 2020 along with the reboot of the Digimon Adventure anime.
I was also more of a Digimon kid than a Pokémon kid growing up, so it brings me much joy that the current TCG is actually picking up steam internationally. Hopefully the franchise keeps flourishing because it really deserves it.
Cycling. I started with a bike that was given to me by my uncle. Now I have a road bike, full equipment x3, a direct drive trainer for the rainy days and a subscription to use that.
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.
Was violist (played the viola) for years. It’s similar to a violin just a bit bigger and deeper. Have a true love for it… But it’s expensive to maintain after a while because it’s good to keep up private lessons, the maintenance of the instrument, and then having to buy sheet music/music books for only playing one song, one passage… I miss it… not the most expensive hobby, but got that way for me cause I am a mom of four and married… SOOOO yeah
My older sister was a very accomplished viola player; she was playing for the all-state youth symphony orchestra (2nd chair?) when she was 16 or 17.
Then she went to BYU, got married, had fucked-if-I-know-how-many kids (it’s at least eight), and… Just doesn’t do anything with it anymore. It’s such a damn shame. I don’t know if she could have been a professional concert violist, but she could have done more with it than she did. I have a friend that was a luthier before he had an accident, so I have a very rough idea of what a good instrument costs, and what maintenance and repairs run–and the cost of a good bow–so I know that shit’s expensive. But still.
Yeah I get it. I was second chair for our highschool orchestra and symphonic orchestra. I also played pit orchestra for our plays. I definitely miss it… but I just don’t have time to play it like I would want… I also need to relearn to count and sight read
Videogames. It has not been super expensive as I enjoy indie games the most, but still.
Pen and paper organization. This is recent. Due to a couple of mental disorders, I have problems remembering things and keeping organized. I was using a to-do list for my phone, but it was becoming less and less effective with time.
So I found a weekly planner online and I bought it telling myself that it was expensive, but it would be enough for a year and I wouldn’t need anything else.
The planner has been great, by the way. Yet, when it arrived, I liked it so much that I had this classic feeling of not wanting to ruin it with my handwriting. I needed a good mechanical pencil! Erasable, yet stylized.
Then I thought the pages looked clean, but monotone. Stickers! What about my own creations? Thermal printer with sticker rolls! And so on and so on.
I am productive …and addicted to stationery items.
Buy a good mechanical pencil and coloured and black leads made by Pentel, Ain Stein model, or Uni’s equivalent. You need not sink money when you get the colour variety with leads.
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!
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…$$$
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).
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!”
You get some gear. It’s nice, but heavy…then you realize there’s so much lighter stuff out there.
$100/lbs later your congratulating yourself that your base weight is 15lbs until you add food and water, and you realize that your pack still is too heavy. You finally shave off another 2 lbs by buying all new luxury items at $30-$50 a pop, and getting a lighter stove.
Then winter comes, and that 4 season, dyneema tent looks mighty appealing. Not to mention you need a better rated sleeping bag (cause that hammock ain’t gonna cut it) and a pad, a better puffy and fleece, crampons, maybe an ice pick, and another stove that works in the cold…
Edit. Damn it, I forgot I need new shoes…even if I wanted to brave it using my summer pair, those trail running shoes are destroyed over the course of 1 season.
No joke I am totally comfortable with a 40L, 20-25lbs base weight, where I get to bring more shit like an ultralight pop out lantern, an extra foam pad to sit on, a flask, an extra tarp to string up for hang out space, camp flip flops, etc.
Each choice is purposefully selected for weight and such, but I include more of them.
Ugh same. I decided to upgrade my very uncomfortable sleeping pad recently which led me to the ultralight subreddit. I went from not having a clue how much my bag weighed to a 10lb base weight, tarp camping, a $400 quilt, 27oz backpack, making my own gear. I don’t even want to count how much I’ve spent in the last year.
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