On 2 Dec 2006 01:40:30 -0800, wrote:

If it were me, I would try something along the lines of developing a
new skill. While you have income, take some furniture making classes
and invest in some top notch tools. If you want to get into
woodworking as a profession, you need to learn how to do a lot of
different tasks very rapidly, and that takes practice. Do that while
you have income and no employees.

Something in the same vein that I've seen working well for people is
cornering a niche market- a very clearly defined one. It's amazing
what people will pay to get one process done. A couple of examples-

Two retired guys used to run an outfit called "precision welding" that
did capacitor discharge welding only for the shop I work for. They
charged $2.65 per part to weld on six pieces of hardware. They've
since quit doing that, and now I have to do it- turns out, I can do
about 100 of those parts an hour- and I'm sure not making $265 an hour
to do it! If you're not familiar with what that is, it's sticking a
special screw in a thing that looks like a little pistol, pressing it
to metal, and pushing a button- takes less than a second per piece of
hardware.

We've also got an outside vendor that makes one part. Just one, on an
old CNC mill. We give him pre-sheared blanks, he mills the outside
edge to shape, drills 20 holes and countersinks them. For that, he
gets better than $20 a part, and doesn't even deburr them. It's a
bargin for my bosses, because they are constantly on order, and the
guys I work with (myself included) hate large production runs.
Farming that stuff out not only keeps production levels in the shop
high, but it also helps to keep the employees from looking for greener
pastures- we're job shop guys, not factory workers.

There are plenty of others. I guess my point is that if you can
handle a little repetition or can lay out an investment for even one
top-notch industrial machine that will run itself, there are a lot of
bread-and-butter jobs that you could make a nice living from at home.
I'd bet that you could buy a nice panel saw, a crapload of MDF, and
cut shelving to standard widths all day long in your garage, and make
a killing at it. Or get a screw-making lathe with a bar feeder, and
let it run while you play around in your shop. Retail won't do that
for you unless you're amazingly gifted at it, and really, genuinely
like people.

Or, on a completely different track, I have observed (though never
really understood why this is the case) that a lot of engineers and
programmers take up plumbing when they change careers, and I've yet to
meet one that didn't appear to be estatically happy about the trade.
Myself, I hate plumbing- but there must be something about it that
appeals to technology workers, and it pays pretty good once you get
past the learning/apprenticeship stage.