Comment by hydrogen18 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hydrogen18 | Hacker News Reader

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What you've essentially discovered is the difference between someone's hobby and trying to support yourself by doing something.

People who do this sort of thing as a hobby just want to feel good and are looking for distractions. A tractor that takes 600 hours to complete and requires extensive access to manufacturing equipment and the knowledge to use it? Great! Think about how much fun I'll have creating blue prints and what not!

Meanwhile if I just needed an actual tractor, there is one rusting in someone's field I can grab off craigslist. It's twice my age but with some basic tools it will run again and will continue to work until long after my death.

It isn't just "farming" (more like gardening for most of these people) that this suffers. It's always cool to see someone's "make your own XYZ for your motorcycle" video on YouTube. But then you realize they just used a turret mill and a metal lathe to make a part you can buy for $100 on Amazon. Just the tooling they used costs over $100. And oh yeah, the part just has to be waited on for Amazon to ship it to me with free shipping via prime.

I build stuff in my free time, but I don't pretend it's cost effective or even a good use of my time. It's just a way to pass the time.

My friend and I call this the "my uncle's machine shop" phenomenon after the seemingly endless forum posts about cars, desert racing, mountain bikes, woodworking etc where someone says something like, "I didn't have the part handy, so I drove over to my Uncle's machine shop and we milled it out of a 6x6x6 inch cube of billet aluminum he had lying around. Then we anodized it, and used it to fix our broken plastic xyz part."

I have consciously spent tens of thousands of dollars on tools to be more capable of building things for myself (bad Return on cash). But some of the stuff these people make and have access to astounds me.

That's genius. I feel like I need to create a blog documenting stuff like this. We could compare the cost of the tooling used vs. the cost of the replacement part.

Except nowadays it is more like "I just went over to my uncle's job that night where we used a $1.5 million CNC machine his employer owns to make a replacement from solid stainless"

On the plus side, the replacement part will probably be better. If the tools don't cost any money, and the material doesn't cost much, and you can do the labor for free, you can make some incredibly cool stuff!

life goal: becoming That Uncle™

You have a good point re needing a working tractor. However on the GP's "just by it from AliBaba" I'd really be surprised if such items would last long enough to become the "rusted one in a field" at a later date; I'd expect the "expensive" home made one might be that long lasting though.

It depends on the item. China is known for low quality goods because companies outsource to China to save money. They are telling the companies in China to make cheap crap. The manufacturers are perfectly capable and more than happy to make high quality items, it just isn't requested of them very often. It is always "use the thinnest possible" not "make it twice as thick as it really needs to be".

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