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A few nits to pick as a woodworker: 1) You never save money building it yourself (at least not in comparison to a standard consumer option, like a chair or tab

• neogodless 5y ago
  No disagreement really. I view it from my perspective as a hobbyist. I enjoy being in the shop working -- and I enjoy making stuff like my work bench, my saw tables and dust shields, my French cleat shelves, etc. I don't really expect to save money (if I do the numbers) so much as I expect to get more out of the process (skills, tools, etc.) than what I get buying something off the shelf. And yes - a professional most likely values their productive time over time spent making jigs, etc. so they will often allocate capital wisely to save time!
• agumonkey 5y ago
  In stuff like car/van furnishings I tend to believe you can save a lot since its not yet an IKEA like market.
  • nathancahill 5y ago
    Absolutely. A van buildout gets crazy pricey when you contract it out. It's relatively easy and cheap to DIY.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      some companies are starting to produce systems in volume though, still pricey but it's probably gonna change
• jefftk 5y ago
  > You never save money building it yourself I agree, if what you want is a standard chair or table. But its common that I will want some piece of furniture that exactly fits some space or is otherwise unusual. For example, shelves that exactly fit my rooms. It does help that I have somewhat low standards for appearance, and am quite content building things out of cheap wood.
  • jjk166 5y ago
    You'd still probably be better off hiring a carpenter who already has the tools than doing it yourself. They can amortize the fixed costs over hundreds of projects.
    • jefftk 5y ago
      Hiring a carpenter is very expensive. The cost of tools is tiny compared to the cost of their labor. (I'm assuming that we're talking about saving money in a way that counts your own time doing something you enjoy as free.)
      • rytis 5y ago
        Exactly that. Top brand tools are expensive, but lower mid range these days is surprisingly cheap, and even for one off projects might "pay for itself". And they get cheaper. Labor costs are increasing. Obviously this comes with few caveats: a) you have to enjoy what you do, so the labor is free and you treat the time as me-time and b) you actually know what you're doing... running in to a disaster and then getting someone to fix it can be very-very expensive :)
      • jjk166 5y ago
        A carpenter charges like $50/hr. A tablesaw alone would likely set you back more than the labor for some simple shelves. Then they can get better deals on material, they do higher quality work, and they do all the parts that aren't fun, like cleaning up at the end. Also your time still has value even if you enjoy what you're doing. You could be doing other hobbies you enjoy more, or other aspects of the same hobby, or making money so that you could afford other opportunities instead. You may enjoy woodworking enough that you're willing to forego the value of that time to pursue it, but that doesn't make it any more economical.
• pbronez 5y ago
  > You never save money building it yourself This comes up in the DIY Audio community. It seems like the economic value proposition is very sensitive to what commercial segment you compare against. You absolutely can't beat low-end, mass-produced speakers on price, but it's easy to beat high-end, boutique speakers on price while getting close on quality.
  • isomorph 5y ago
    Where can I find out more about this community?
    • Upgrayyed_U 5y ago
      Search for audiophile forums on the net. Most will have a dedicated area for DIYers.
  • GuB-42 5y ago
    A common money-saving trick is to buy cheap electronics from AliExpress or the likes and upgrade just the right components. Often, these dirt cheap products are based on pretty decent ICs, but with corners cut on the surrounding circuitry. Sometimes, just changing some components to match the reference circuit can do wonders. Sometimes it is just a matter of replacing a counterfeit cap with a bigger counterfeit cap :)
• dimitrios1 5y ago
  Yeah, GP really should have prefaced this with hobbyist woodworker delimma, because it did ring true for me as a, well, hobbyist woodworker, but it is definitely no where near true for professional woodworkers, joiners, cabinetmakers, furniture makers. For them, there is no "end" even when completing a build. There's simply just the next client to tend to.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  I built my dream workbench. The commercial ones were too light. I wanted one that was 8 feet long, and 4 deep, that I could bolt a big vise to, and whale away at whatever was in the vise without the bench scittering across the floor. It is build entirely from 4x4s for the legs, 2x4s for the rest of the frame, and 1x8 planks for the top and shelf. It's all held together with carriage bolts so it can be disassembled, and the top can be replaced. No plywood or glued sawdust. It only took an hour or so to put together. Very happy with it. I later installed wall sockets in the front so power cords needn't be draped over the top. The only problem was drilling the bolt holes perpendicular. I later acquired a drill press to solve that.
  • euroderf 5y ago
    Sounds good. Post a sketch or plan somewhere ?
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      Not much to it. No sawing required other than the length. 6 4x4 vertical posts in a 3 by 2 configuration. A skirt around the top of 2x4s, and another 1/3 up from the ground. A 2x4 connecting the center posts at top and bottom. Then just plank the top, and plank 1/3 up to make a shelf. Drill & bolt. Don't tighten the bolts until it is all together. Then set it in place and let it settle all the posts firmly on the floor, then tighten. I left it au natural because I like the look and feel of sawn wood. Hope you like yours as much as I like mine.
  • Fomite 5y ago
    Spent so much time planning out and figuring out how to build a custom workbench for a weird area (sometimes, you just need an airbrush booth in a bath/shower stall). Ended up just buying something from Harbor Freight.
  • mdoms 5y ago
    The benchtop is only 1 inch thick? That's not a heavy duty bench. My kitchen has thicker benchtops.
• manachar 5y ago
  There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself. I love to bake and cook. I can do so fairly frugally. A supermarket frozen pie is still gonna be cheaper than anything I can make, especially if I count my time. It's a benefit and goal of the modern global industrialized supply chain, but I cannot help feel that making me work a full time job to buy cheap things means we don't put enough economic value on people making things themselves. Then again, I like not having to mine my own lithium, copper, etc. to get a computer.
  • masklinn 5y ago
    > There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself. How? It’s pretty much the point and purpose of civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation. > we don't put enough economic value on people making things themselves. The invisible hand is a middle finger. Always has been.
    • cuddlybacon 5y ago
      > > There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself. > How? It’s pretty much the point and purpose of civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation. Civilization isn't necessary for this to be true. It is even true in small scale societies. You can observe this whenever they get cutoff from each other: they end up technologically regressing. It is more expensive to do everything themselves, so they end up losing access to technologies. The world where this was last true was when the common ancestor of us and neanderthals were still around.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        really, it's about division of labor, aka "allow someone to become much, much better at making chairs than you, a non-chairmaker, will ever be." When you get so good at making something that it takes you 0.1-0.5 of the time it takes someone less experienced/skilled, the cost of your labor becomes an diminishingly small part of the overall cost. That makes it ever more difficult for the unskilled person to ever be able to make it "cheaper", even if they consider their time to be free.
• bartread 5y ago
  > You never save money building it yourself I know where you're coming from with this. I've been refurbing my house myself and I doubt I've saved that much because the "saving" has meant that I've been able to buy tools and, of course, better quality materials (e.g., more expensive flooring). I've also often chosen to go the extra mile with improvements where I might have scaled back if I were paying someone. I suppose you could argue this is a saving in that I've got more value out of the money I've spent by treating my own time as "free labour", but have I spent less? I doubt it. Still, I don't know if it's entirely true in all circumstances. Here, for example, TheGeekPub (The 8-Bit Guy's brother) manages to save himself a ton by building his own electronics station rather than buying one or paying a carpenter to do it for him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KfWMJV7fQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KfWMJV7fQ0 But then, as becomes evident when you watch the video, he already owned all the tools he needed and just had to buy the materials, which were relatively inexpensive. I think the results look great though, and it's clearly an extremely functional piece of furniture. Like a lot of things in life, does it save you money? It really depends on your starting conditions (skill level, tools and facilities), and how much you want to invest in the project (both time and money).
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    There's also a timeline element to this. I may not have saved myself any money at all by doing things myself when I was 25. But now I'm 57, and I can more or less fix anything in my house, and carry out more or less any changes I want or need to do, without outside assistance. Me fixing that one toilet leak myself at 25 was probably a net cost to myself - tools & time considered. But at this point, when I can just remove a defunct radiant heating system from my house without even thinking of calling a plumber - by this point, I'm way ahead on cost. Similarly for electrical and basic framing work. Plus, I manage to almost entirely avoid having to interview/audition contractors and deal with the stress of them (almost invariably) doing a worse job that I would have done myself.
    • nrb 5y ago
      Something to keep in mind is, despite those 30 years of experience that leads to one not needing to think about contacting a professional, knowing whether the work you're about to perform requires any permits/code; the lack of which might affect homeowners insurance claims or local code enforcement.
• mrmuagi 5y ago
  > 1) You never save money building it yourself Yes and no. The deciding factor besides fixed cost of tools is your time. Consider kitchen cabinets. Sure you can build them yourselves, but it'll take weeks, maybe a month of your time which when compared to ikea/box store cabinets you could spend more to save time. If you want to spend even more you can get some custom work done at the cost of having little to no effort needed.
• derefr 5y ago
  > But with the cost of tools, you're probably still losing money if this is just a hobby What if you don't buy your own tools? Aren't there woodworking tools in maker-spaces?
• akiselev 5y ago
  Agree completely, with the caveat that standard consumer options are usually absolute crap unless you're spending serious money. I'm probably still in the red on my workshop as a whole (damn you Festool) but once I started needing stacks of large canvases to paint on and shelving to store them, for example, the most expensive piece of kit (Domino XL) started rapidly paying itself off. If you're like me and want to do everything yourself, the payback is exponential the more you do and longer you do it. The possibilities compared to standard consumer options are downright overwhelming but once you get started, you find out a lot of the consumer stuff is easy to replicate with minimal skills or expense. Take a look at what it takes to make a decent sectional [1] for example - it's a lot of time but if you're frugal with fabric at your local uphostery store, the savings on labor are easily $1k+. The problems set in the second you try to profit from it - professional [anything] is a completely different ballgame. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNX3Z2cfiJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNX3Z2cfiJA