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

[Neil Johnson]

Hi,

Robert Lorentz wrote:
> 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.

Unless you work for a design consultancy firm, in which case you do :)  But then the hourly fees are very high to compensate all that potential loss - customers don't like paying for your screw-ups, so you charge them a flat hourly rate, but which is marked up to cover yourself when you *do* screw up.

> 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.

Economies of small batch production - you can still lose money at this stage.

Cheers,
Neil


--
http://www.njohnson.co.uk

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