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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. CNC machines for wood are cheap. Rigidity requirements are fairly low. Some people even built their own CNC machines out of wood. Even a 3 axis CNC mill that does aluminum is reasonably cheap but you'll have to assemble the kit yourself. If you want to do steel then you might as well give up.

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A minimax bandsaw costs about $2-3000. A sawstop around $3000. A jointer/planer combo another $5000. So you're all in for a complete woodworking setup for $10,000. But then you need a couple hundred square feet to put them in with sufficient room around them to store wood, maneuver and perform assembly. At $100/sf for a garage area, you are hitting $20,000. You generally can't just add 200 or 500 sf to your house, and moving is expensive. The space is more expensive than the actual tools that fill it.

If you want to have a space intensive hobby then you have to be able to afford the space. This requires either being rich or being somewhere space is cheap or some middle ground between the two. All hobbies have opportunity costs. If you have high culture related hobbies then you are probably going to want to be in a major city which comes with its own trade-offs.

I do metalworking. One of my good friends does woodworking. We both live in <1500sf houses and do our hobbies in our basements (I specifically bought a house with a walk in basement for this purpose). The trade-off is that we can't turn our basements into bars, mancaves, TV rooms or sex dungeons. Oh well, just like any other hobby there is an opportunity cost. We both have more money sunk into random odds and ends hand tools, extension cords, lighting, fume extraction, etc. etc. than we do our big tools.

Those are all extremely high end tools though! By comparison, you can probably find a used Unisaw for $500, a used 14" bandsaw for $400, a used 8" jointer for $500-$800 and a used 12" planer for similar if you look around. Yeah, that's a small jointer and planer depending on what you're trying to build, but the point remains that you don't need to spend $10,000 to get started.

And I know somebody is going to point out that the Unisaw is less safe than the SawStop, but the SawStop is only going to save you from cutting yourself. It won't save you from kickback; you still need to know how to use the saw safely. The technology isn't a substitute for training.

If you can find a local makerspace that has a woodshop, you can trade capex for opex, get access to far bigger and better tools than you'd likely buy starting out, not have to pay for the space to put them in, and likely be able to get training in how to use them safely and effectively.

If you have the land, building a large shed or pole barn isn't expensive. You can get a nice workshop for under $10,000 installed. Heck, constructing a large shed isn't that difficult. You can do most of the work yourself and outsource the electric.

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