[sdiy] making 2 or 3 dollars an hour on synth building?

[Robert Lorentz]

Ever hear the expression, "..but I'll make money on the second one"

one-offs of any engineering task are impossible to make anything near
reasonable return on.  You don't profit from design, researching,
troubleshooting, realizing you were wrong, sourcing every single part,
scrap'ing boards or destroying parts.  You profit from coming up with
the prototype and then building 10 of them, implementing cost savings
from bulk part orders, knowing how to build them so as to speed up
production, and so forth.

Even if parts/materials are being paid for - your first prototype
should be just a speculative venture.  Understand that the moment you
are making money you are commercializing your interest, which involves
quite a bit of business theory and not a lot of fun factor.  If you
are interested solely in designing and are creating something very
production intensive, consider hiring someone to build for you.  Most
folks I've seen that work as assemblers also do it on the side, if you
are in NYC you should have absolutely no problem finding someone to do
it for you.

I consider myself pretty fast and clean with soldering (less so with
wiring).  But when I see my dad's girlfriend put out like 20 boards
with like 100 of the tiniest SMD components on each in an hour, I
realize that any mass production should seriously be outsourced.


If this sounds complicated, kitting stuff, contracting it to be built,
speculating on any new design or deviations, well, it is.  That's why
(i'm under the impression that) most people here have more typical day
jobs, despite knowing a huge amount about synths.


Side note - I've been building x0xb0xes as side work for a while, just
as I've started to get fast with it, the economy has tanked and the
value of finished product on ebay has plummeted to about 50% of what
it was when I started (mainly because all of a sudden dollars are
worth a lot compared to other worldcurrency, and much synth interest
is overseas).  I would be absolutely screwed if this were my only
income, so be prepared.


Good luck

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:18 AM, Dan Snazelle <subjectivity at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> well i installed the audio ark this weekend at a beautiful estate in northern new york. i was terrified the person paying for the box was going to hate it but luckily that was not the case. it sounded great and looked good in his rack sitting above two eventide boxes and an MPRESSOR.
>
> HOWEVER
>
>  i am quickly starting to see that making a living, or supplementing my income from audio electronics may be a bit of a
> ridiculous idea. for the amount of hours i put into the audio ark, i probably ended up making about 61 dollars a week (for
> 36 weeks)
>
> this is NOT practical. especially when many of those weeks, i was working so much on the ark that i had no time for my REAL job of being a recording guy in nyc. If i was working 40 or more hours a week on the ark (which was often the case) i was making around 2 or 3 dollars an hour. (or even less)
>
> (AND I STILL HAVE TO WRITE THE MANUAL)
>
> maybe due to the size or the amount of work that went into figuring out a good method of tracking, or due to the time of soldering and wiring..i dont know...but if this is the most one can make building a box of that size...well i dont think i would ever do it again! and this isnt meant as an angry statement. far from it. But it was a TON of work. late nights...early mornings...technical hurdles...hand burns....and I think for that amount of work, there has to be a payoff. (which there always is when you are building it for YOURSELF)
>
> at least the parts were paid for as i was building it. but lets stop and think about if they were NOT...then i would have had to put about 2000 dollars of my OWN money into the box, which would not have been recouped till the very end. which seems very risky (if you arent even sure there are buyers)
>
> wow.
>
>
>
> so i am interested in knowing
>
> 1. is it really THAT hard to do better than breaking even when  building synth related stuff for people (even just one offs)
> 2. how does anyone make a real living doing it?
> 3. is it any better with small boxes? (fx,etc)
> 4. what are some good ways of estimating a cost at the start? (i estimated waaaay too low and hurt myself because of it. an agreed upon price is an agreed upon price no matter how wrong i might have been.)
>
>
> granted...i will be doing synth diy for myself no matter what. and i am proud of the
> monster that i built.
>
> but maybe stompbox style synth creations are a bit more realistic than giant machines?
>
> i would love to hear of your experiences with this.
>
> thanks so much
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Synth-diy mailing list
> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
>