Three customers lined up is great. Until money changes hands, it’s the theoretical flux capacitator from above. How long did it take to get those customers lined up? How many more are out there available to you? Until money changes hands, it’s the flux capacitator. You need some cheap way to test. Like maybe using someone else’s kit, renting by the hour.

If your 3 customers are willing to wait for you to make up your mind about buying X, they’re willing to wait a week for China (probably.) They’re meeting their needs SOMEHOW right now. 24 hour turnaround from a shop running $250K kit? No fucking problem. How about multimillion $ kit? Just so’s you don’t think I’m bullshitting you, the place I used to work in would do that, and they were running a cutter that cost a couple of mil, plus benders, plus the welders and sanders and a third party painter across the street. For another example, I can think of at least 3 places within an hour’s drive of me running EOSINT M280 laser sintering machines in cobalt chromium/wax 3D printers and furnaces for casting, whose whole model is 24 hour global turnaround. Orders come in in the morning, by evening they are on the plane going to Japan/wherever. Maybe Israel is more advanced than the UK in that sense, but I doubt it.

I hope you add enough value to justify the proposition, and the best way to test is to rent kit for a bit.

1/ you guarantee they are doing more? yeah, more skulls, more iphone holders, more cat engravings…

2/ honda c90 is an excellent and vastly under estimated bike, I have never owned one, I own a litre bike, vee twin

3/ selling machine time by the hour to business customers, who would sell the product I make for them to *their* customers, and, assuming I buy *my* X, which is by no means certain, I have three business customers lined up, and no, none of it is acrylic or signs or model parts or trophys…

4/ no comparison with dealing with someone face to face, and offshoring prototyping or manufacturing, how the fuck you gonna get a 24 hour turnaround from china, or from a pukka shop running 250k kit in shifts?

5/ yeah, you supply the material and design files, that way you control quality and costs, and for the three mentioned above, they wouldn’t have it any other way, nor would they allow their proprietary designs (files) out of their sight…

6/ you’ll drive to my shop because you control the quality of material, you control the proprietary files, you control the production schedule, as I said, 24 hour turn-around, for the three potential customers mentioned above, they are trying to hand me money, because NONE of those things are available elsewhere, much less all of them.

Did you miss everything I said about X not being it, or “you + X” being it, *if* you can differentiate yourself from 99.9% of the other assholes out there.

Fab Labs are everything you say. Nerds/twats with weapons-grade egos and faces like a 50 y.o. lesbians abound. The kit is hobby grade. But-I still guarantee you that people are doing more with that hobby grade shit than you are with your pro kit. It is funny that when it comes to motorcycles, you’re all about the Honda C90, because it gets you from point A to point B in the most efficient manner with minimum bullshit, and who the hell needs a liter bike, but when it comes to fabrication kit, all of a sudden, the equivalent of that C90 won’t do at all.

Selling machine time by the hour? To whom? To design college students? If I have a design and I want it made and can’t make it out of thin acrylic or plywood in the school lab or Fab Lab, I’ll go to a professional fabrication shop running a 2KW laser, and try to convince the owner to help me make it. Probably he’ll tell me to get fucked if I need one piece or ten, because it’s not worth his time, the bullshit, the possibility of my non-payment, blablabla. But if I’m dealing with some cantankerous asshole throwing cigarette butts at my feet to sublimate his painful apprenticeship dodging wrenches and running a pantograph from 1948-1952, at the very least I would like to know that 1) he can cut 20-40mm stainless if need be, 2) I can get it bent, welded, sanded and painted at his place. Then my problem reduces to overcoming the barrier of his asshole personality, how I can get him to like me/whatever. But if it’s the same barrier, and the upside is, he’s got a 100W CO2 laser, fuck that noise-I can order the same thing from a Chinese prototyping shop, which the guys with ideas and designs are already doing, and they don’t have to go through the hassle of sourcing their own material (are you shitting me? I go to a shop and have to bring my own material for which I paid retail?) As for your own shit-it’s a question whether the demand is there, and again you need some cheap and fast way of testing that assumption.

I’m not putting a bet on you being there in 2-5 years. I don’t know you from Adam, other than I read your blog. I definitely wish you luck with the project. All I’m saying is, you’ve gotta test the assumptions cheaply and quickly before putting money in. Maybe it turns out that for what there’s a market for, a homebuilt plasma table or your CNC stuff is better (and you know as well as I do that just like there is stuff that lasers/water cutters can do that CNC can’t, the opposite is also true.)

If you don’t own the kit and someone else does-so what? Shades of your pontificating on a house that’s “yours” but actually belongs to the bank and all it really represents is a big liability on the downside.

I haven’t spent decades in the business, but I’ve been on all sides of it, running machines and getting designs made. My two cents-the old model, where the shop owner fancied himself a master craftsman, as though he was hand-turning screws in Sheffield in 1754, and talked down to customers who were neither big corporate accounts nor his buddies, is dead. Those dudes are scrapping for business, running their million dollar machines for 60% of an 8 hour shift, and bitching and moaning about China, as though China was the problem. The problem was that dealing with them was such a pain in the ass that as soon as China came along, they were done-if I can send an .stl or .sldprt to Shanghai, and they will give me a quote and get me the part, why am I gonna drive to your shop and get cigarette butts thrown at my feet for asking a question? It’s like a coffee shop where the douche barrista looks down his nose at you for ordering a machine drip coffee, and takes 15 minutes to pour it. The replacement will not be a Starbucks model, where the machine shop kisses your ass and serves you a standard mediocre product (which is a bit of what China has to offer,) but something else.

my X is a full format 100/120 watt (actual beam power) laser, 40 mm acrylic / wood cut capacity, 2 mm steel cut capacity, powered Z axis, 1.3 metres/sec speeds, ……. and none of the interesting stuff can be emulated with the mill, or any other “contact” cutting system… fab labs can’t deliver that level of kit, and yes, I do know what kit they actually have, , or even a decent mill, my bitch, for all its faults, will cut anything, spin a 16 mm cutter into steel bar? No problemo… cunts haven’t got a lathe either, or a compressor, or a vacuum pump, or a couple of heavy duty true pro bench PSU’s, or a scope, or air tools, or welders, I could go on and on….lol…. nor can the cunts get or source decent materials at trade prices or less…

…and the fab labs are, personally speaking, everything I fucking hate, fucking linux user groups with dremels and mankinis…lol, still a bunch of assholes….. without even stepping through the doors of the local one I fucking guarantee at least two of the biggest assholes from the local LUG will be there interfering with everything and having positions of influence and authority…

way way way ahead of you on possible uses, and you are exactly right, selling a bunch of shit on an individual piecework basis to kids and assholes will be the death of it, if I do it it will be selling machine time by the hour or multiple thereof, you gimme your material and design, I’ll do the rest…. plus I can do my own shit.

But, my X is subject to my finance, as you can tell, I pretty much don’t use hobby grade tools, because they limit you so much, and pro grade stuff lasts forever, it just costs an arm and a leg, and yes there is a huge difference between a 250k machine that needs to run batch jobs 2 shifts a day 6 days a week to make money, and the lower end of the market, but there are vast swathes of things that simply cannot be done with even a high end expensive hobby machine, that a low end pro machine can do with ease, it’s that niche between hobby grade and production batch jobs, that’s the only niche for me.

55 year old woman complaining about hubby? mebbe, doing it for catharsis? mebbe, obviously going to still be there in one/two/three years, that’s one fucking bet I wouldn’t take, at any odds.

Getting away from *my* X and back on to the subject of X in the post.

“The workers control the means of production” if you do not, in house, then you are not the worker and you are not in control, practising with someone else’s kit can’t teach you anything *important* about doing it with your own kit, it’s just not the same thing….. Borrowing Joe’s tools and ramp etc isn’t gong to teach me a damn thing about setting up for myself as a garage / mechanic.

Not saying it won’t generate some useful data, just not enough, and by definition it will generate bad data, because it isn’t plowing your own furrow….

If you are actually interested in making a living with X and want to see if you can do it in your place and time, then the smart thing to do would be to find a decent, cheaper proxy for having X and advertise for the same functions you’d use X for.

There are some applications for X that you can emulate with your CNC mill. For instance, you can flat cut plywood or acrylic or engrave on stone. Sure, it will take longer, your inner radius will be bigger (unless you get a tiny end mill, which will take even longer,) you’ll need a sacrificial layer, cutting into your profit margin, you’ll need to get creative clamping the work down, maybe make a vacuum table, etc. But you’re not trying to make a profit, just to gain information cheaply.

There are other applications for X that you can’t emulate with equipment available on-hand. Say, cutting/rastering leather, or business cards. But you can rent X by the hour. In SW England, there are hackerspaces, a Fab Lab in Devon, another in Bristol, etc. If you secure customers, you can make their work in the hackerspace. Again, lower profit margins, but no fixed upfront cost. Cheap information.

Ultimately, the way to make money on digital fabrication, as you allude to is to rent out engineering/design knowledge and post-processing, and marketing as value-added. Business cards are a good way to go, or you could build a hot-wire bender for laser-cut acrylic. Since there’s a recession on, businesses are scrapping for customers. A laser-cut acrylic sign with LED lighting or some intricate lasercut business cards out of two-tone cardboard are cheap enough to try and see if they bring the cupcake shop a few more customers a week. Even more rudimentary, I knew a girl in 2012 in the NE US, in a shitty town which tanked 40 years ago, who was making a living laser cutting trinket jewelry out of acrylic. She sold it dirt cheap, it cost her less to make, enough 12 year old girls bought it and the margin was enough for her to rent laser cutter time, buy acrylic and stay alive (heh-imagine Uncle AfOR selling acrylic earrings to 12 year old girls.) You can always be a middleman, ordering designs from Indians on Fiver and selling the final product to Brits.

The question is, as you point out, how much time and energy you’re willing to spend on all the value-added activities above. Designing flim-flam shit, marketing to 12 year old girls and 45 year old divorced cupcake shop owners, collecting the money/listening to bullshit excuses and attempts to bargain, dealing with emerging competition…maybe you’d be happier just staying with the IT job. For all you complain about the incompetence and bureaucracy, it’s a bit like some 55 year old woman complaining about her husband-it’s obvious she’s going nowhere and is just doing it for catharsis 🙂