Any art medium that requires canvases. A small one at WalMart is no problem, but as you move to larger works and need better canvas material it gets expensive fast.
Oh! And Arduino programming. A simple kit to get going isn’t too bad. Then you’re trolling Adafruit for parts, then you go big and start importing from China directly. Now you’re building a garage addition for the electronics lab… Or is that just me? At least it’s also able house my first motorcycle… First…
I started knitting for my kids when we were living in colorado.
so I ended up processing wool from raw fleece -> hat
raw merino fleece, raw alpaca fleece, Scouring soap, dye, dyeing classes with natalie redding, spinning wheel, drum carder, hackle, table loom, warping thing for yarn
Math
ended up going to school for math education (with pell grant $500 per 6 month term) I can’t pass the exit exam. tried 5 times out of those I had to pay out of pocket for 4 of them $480.
and surprise, I got dxed with ADHD. That’s why I couldn’t pass the tests. now I pay $50 a month for it (doc + meds)
My sister has knitted since she was a kid. Later started creating fleece items. Then she bought raw wool, washed, spun and dyed it. Then bought a wooden … loom? to make carpets from it.
I must have $700 worth of floss a 200$ custom stand and then accessories, I just gave away 82 skeins of off brand that advertised dmc dye standards, but WEREN’T. Don’t buy floss from Amazon kids, it’s worth it to do a custom order from joanns or Michael’s mid project.
It started with wanting to do a fun little Christmas ornament project with the Littles and now I have 7 mid finished projects including a massive LOTR project I’ve restated 3 times, that has 1 of 12 8×11 pages done on this beast l nearly 3’x2’ Aida cloth.
RC stuff, but only kinda? My dad got me into micro helicopters about a decade ago. I now have several dozen planes, drones, helis, etc. Not to mention multiple RC radios, batteries, chargers, and FPV goggles. Absolutely love it, though. To be fair, it’s been a few thousand dollars over a decade. It ads up sure… but quite a bit less than I spend on video games, and more satisfying. :)
Out of curiosity, have the battery lives improved from older RC vehicles? I’ve looked at some current models and it still seems like they run only a short time, but I’ve not followed RC stuff closely enough to know if they’ve really gotten much better and I’m lacking the context.
I race electric on-road and we have a couple endurance races we run every year. We’re able to get upwards of 45+ minutes of run time without losing performance from some of our high capacity (8000mah+) batteries.
But we also run high turn (21.5t or 25.5t), and sometimes fixed timing, motors, so draw isn’t that significant.
My Losi Baja Rey running a 3600kv (beefy, high draw) motor gets 15-20 minutes of run time from my 5000mah battery depending on how hard I run it.
Run time really comes down to how high draw the motor is, lipo battery technology is significantly improved over the old nicad and nimh chemistries of the past.
Thanks for the reply and insight! I suspect some of the models I was looking at may have had some lower capacity batteries to try to balance out the costs, and I was overlooking that.
Depends on what you want to get and how you use them. I have racing drones with batteries that only last 4 minutes, and a few planes that last 30-60 minutes. Lipos haven’t improved radically in the last decade, but they are a lot better than nickel batteries from a few decades ago though.
I’ve been racing RC cars for about 7 years. The last time I tallied it up, I estimated that I’ve spent about $15k all-in on the hobby.
Between cars, tools, bodies, paints, tires, racing fees, program setup like hauler bags, batteries, oils, springs, hop ups, and a dozen other things the costs can get out of hand quick lol. I’ve had to pull back my budget a LOT since getting a divorce and it’s getting cheap, but that’s only possible because of how much I’ve already spent on my program, and my cars are getting old. I’ll need to find a few hundred dollars in the next year at least.
Ah racing yeah. I had a friend that was into that, and it seems to get pretty spendy. I do a lot of scratch built planes, so it’s quite a bit cheaper I think. Even a “spendy” store bought plane tends to only be $200 - $300. Racing drones cost about as much, but I don’t really race them, and rarely break them anymore.
Yea, I spent $400 on my radio, and that’s a mid grade Sanwa. But I won’t replace it for a long time.
On a budget you need to spend around $500 to have everything you need to put a car down and race, which includes some basic tools. So yea, it gets expensive fast.
Not sure if you’d call it a hobby or more of a collection but I collect mechanical wrist watches and that can get expensive fast.
I started with a mechanical under $100, with a decent movement and a display back case so I could see the gears and rotor inside, and that could’ve been it. But once you get the bug, you want to get different types of movements, different case sizes, maybe some complications, sooner or later you’re going to start wanting some hand finishing, and then it gets really expensive. I wanna get into mechanical watch repair too but that gets really expensive and takes a lot of skill and time so I’m going to hold off a few years I think. Plus once I go there, there’s no coming back. I’ll be buying broken stuff on eBay constantly and there goes all my paycheques
I got into theater lighting in high school & college. Years after graduating and getting a “real” job I discovered a bunch of all volunteer community theaters in the towns around me. I started doing lighting design, and over time amassed a bunch of my own gear. I’ve also gotten a bit of a name for figuring out special effects. In my basement I have a dozen professional LED stage lights, strobe lights, a fog machine & hazer, and a bunch of bins of odds & ends used for various effects.
Discs cost only $15-20 new, used ones can be only a few bucks, you only need one or a few to play, and most courses are free.
In reality, you keep buying new discs. And a bag to carry them. And more discs. And a bigger bag. Then a home basket. And a net to practice in. And more discs. Then a rack to hold the extra discs you can’t bag…. It adds up!
Hobby electronics started cheep, with a crappy soldering iron (a good precision one was the best purchase ever) and some cheep parts, ended up with a room stuffed with a thousand dollars worth or parts and a few thousand more in test equipment.
Add comment