Dammit, I really wanted some cookies too..
@yotsuya - this is why I don't feel all that comfortable selling anything I make to anyone other than family or friends. I am confident enough in my cabinet skills to know it isn't going to fall apart after a year, and I will only set up the games I know will work good enough to not require me coming over twice a month to fix something, but when it comes down to it, I have no desire to make this another job. I have made a dozen or two pieces of furniture in the past for family and friends, but I have turned down 20 times that much work for people I don't know. Plus the last thing I want is to turn another hobby into a job - it takes the fun out of it when you have a deadline (other than your own) and when you HAVE to do it instead of doing it because you want to.
I used to love doing car audio, it fit everything I really enjoyed doing. There was the electrical aspect where I got to play with coils, capacitors, diodes, lights, relays, circuit breakers, transistors, resistors, and pretty much every aspect of electricity. Then there was the technology side where I got to play with all sorts or technology from old to cutting edge. The creativity aspect where I could come up with all sorts of customized and unique ways of doing things. There was the carpentry aspect where I got to build things with wood, metal, or fiberglass. And of course there was the music aspect where I was basically making music sound really good every day. But after about 9 years of doing it I woke up one day and didn't want to go to work. I didn't want to run another power wire through a firewall, or take another seat out of a car, or troubleshoot another malfunctioning alarm system, or deal with another customer who couldn't understand that running things wide open for too long will ALWAYS damage something. And the thing is, I HAD to do it so I could provide for my family, not because I loved what I did. In the 15 years since then I have done maybe 7 big systems and a half dozen other related tasks. It just has zero appeal to me any more.
Some people think that if they could do their hobby for a living it would be awesome, and to some extent it can be. But the moment you realize you are no longer doing it because you enjoy it but rather because you have to do it to make ends meet, you lose something you can never get back. I have no desire to make this hobby into another business.
I don't want to start building arcade cabinets and end up with some pieced together monstrosity that my kids hang laundry on because I lost interest in it after the 10th build for someone else..
On the other hand, if I can make enough money to support what I want to do for myself, and I can do it on a timeline that works for ME, then I am all for it. And if I can do all the detail work now while I am still really jacked about doing this, and have it all set up to cut out with a cnc router, then in the future if someone wants one, I can just get the pieces all cut out, spend a few hours in the shop laying down paint, an hour or two setting up software, and make a few hundred dollars cash, that works for me too. I fleshed out my woodshop by building furniture for people and using the profit to buy more or better tools. I always had cutting edge computers for myself that were paid for by building computers for other people. I would love to end up with a couple sweet arcade cabinet setups and a few new specialty tools out of this, but I already have a job that pays more than I could ever make building and selling arcade cabinets.
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Topic: My inner nerd has taken over.. (Read 1766 times)
