"RoyJ" wrote in message
m...
A few comments;

Putting up a separate building tends to raise the profile of the whole
thing to the point where it hits the local building officials' radar. All
of a sudden they take a LOT of interest in your activities, may tell you
that you can't do "light manufacturing" in a residential area or similar.

I didn't go into all the detail in the original post but I plan to put up a
little pole building for my home machine workshop anyway. The house I used
to live in has a 30 X 50 building and that is my home machine shop, it's
about 5 miles away from my current house. Currently I live out of town and
have around 4-1/2 acres with no outbuildings except a portable storage
building.

Pricing your product is weird. As long as you are doing it as a hobby,
just want to cover the costs of your equipment, make a few bucks for beer
you get one set of costs/prices. As soon as you want to make real money,
pay yourself some semblance of an honest wage, actually pay down the cost
of your equipment, you get another set of costs/prices. The latter is
usually at least double the hobbyist version.

Then there is the risk part. In our lawyer happy society, it's really a
good idea to carefully review what kinds of things you make. Liability
insurance starts looking like a good investment. The company I used to
work for flatly refused to do any aircraft related work. Too much
liability. (Of course the fact that there wasn't much money in it compared
to our mainstream business had a lot to do with making us not do what we
said we were not going to do!)

I'd suggest that you figure out if your 'business model' actually works
before going too far. Pick one of your pet projects, make the parts in the
current shop, set up an e-bay store, see what happens for a few months (or
even a year). Keep accurate records of your out of pocket costs and your
time. Things like your CNC program development time, your setup time to
get a fixture mounted and aligned in the mill, the actual run time, the
time spent boxing stuff and running off to the post office/UPS store, etc
etc. See what the market will bear for pricing.

All that said, I know a fellow who lives in the country on a 20 acre hobby
farm. Has a mail order ONLY business making high end race ATV parts. Has
2000 square foot office/warehouse/shop/garage to work out of. Makes a
comfortable living while employing his son part time as a welder and his
wife half time as the accountant/shipping clerk. Sounds like a decent life
style to me!!! Go for it. Just make sure you know what you are doing
before you commit a lot of time or money.


Sounds like good advice, I don't plan to quit my day job :-) I plan to have
a building for my home shop, it would be nice if it could be used for paying
for the building, but I won't depend on it. I guess if I go at it with the
primary goal of having fun, learning, and teaching my son, it will be
worthwhile even if I don't make any money at it. On the other hand we might
come up with some specialty parts that might make a decent second income.

RogerN