LeftyStrat wrote:Making a living hand building amps is probably a fantasy many of us have, but the numbers don't add up for me. I'd need $60 an hour and 40 hours a week to just rent a house in Ballard. And that would be without health insurance.
I could move somewhere cheaper, but then I would be farther away from working musicians.
As painful as it sounds for me to say this, wealth comes from convincing others to strive for your enrichment. Right now Chinese are cheaper, and they will eventually learn quality.
Ken didn't die wealthy, and neither will Alexander.
And even if you come up with the most incredible circuit ever, all of us on TAG will clone it.
The thing about fantasies is the reality rarely lives up to them. When a hobby becomes a business, it stops being a hobby. Sure you can still enjoy it, but it's suddenly loaded with a ton of responsibilities and non amp related things, like any business. Basically there are a bunch of things that you don't dream about that can take the fun out of it. Sure, you can make a living building amps, 10 years and still going strong for me. I have decent house on a lake, a brand new car and a lovely old classic Jaguar. None of which I had previously. My wife is in full time graduate school which we are paying for and my daughter starts college next year.
We have medical and dental insurance and the business and myself pay taxes.
However, if I had stayed in a Corporate jobI could have been earning twice as much by now and probably not have to work 80 hours a week.
Design and technical ability aside there are several things that can trip you up. Let's say you build an amp for fun and one of the jacks packs in after a month, you go in and replace it and think nothing of it. A couple of bucks and no big deal. Now let's say you have bought a batch jacks and suddenly you have 30 customers start popping up with the same problem, you have to ship them back, repair and return them or arrange techs to change them if they are far away or abroad. This now becomes a lot of time and expense. That's a real world example based on a batch of Cliff jacks I had last year.
I noticed someone mentioned Shad had cab supply problems recently. Many of us have suffered massive long and unexpected lead times in the past few months right after mojo bought out lopo and moved everything to NC. For the first time ever I ended up with zero cabs in stock and 15 chassis on the floor at one point. Henry at Redplate was in the same place exactly. We openly shared potential alternative suppliers and how to approach Mojo to rectify the issue.
There are so many things that can trip you up and it's frustrating when you see people making assumptions. It really doesn't take much for a lead time to go from 4 weeks to 4 months and often it's out of your control.
Not taking massive deposits and communication are the keys.
I don't know personally Shad at all, the little interaction I have had with him has not been great, but I still know how it feels when you are trying to catch up and everyone's chasing you constantly. I also know how utterly frustrating some of the dickheads on this forum can be.
The thing is even if you have Dealers and don't take deposits, people call and email and even post on your personal Facebook asking for status updates constantly, it wears you out at times.
I can only imagine how bad it would be if you have their money.
On the flip side, the number of builders and now even dealers that do implode doesn't help customer confidence levels and there is most definitely a higher level if anxiety and paranoia across the board that we have to deal with.
I hope Shad the best in the catch up and truly do know how it feels when you get kicked when you are down. I have one message to the previous haters from this site. let's see you build a business building guitar amplifiers for a living, it's nothing at all like your hobby.
Alan.