Let me tell you about me Gear Fabrication Syndrome
weenoisemaker.com
weenoisemaker.com
> It’s driven in part by the belief that new gear will improve one’s art or performance, e.g. I don’t sound like Jimi Hendrix because I don’t have the same effects pedal he used.
Bit tangent, but I think one should just embrace it and say “my hobby is collecting guitar gear, and my niche is things that Jimi Hendrix used or things that make sounds like he did”
There’s no shame in a hobby collecting and being honest with yourself might bring some clarity to your life.
That's something I noticed with a lot of people in my circle and 3d printers. They don't 3d print for their hobby. Most of them have 3d printing or even 3d printers as their hobby.
Personally I like to use my printer to enable my other hobbies, but along the way I've picked up 3d design and printing as secondary hobbies.
But it's only worth it if you have a reasonable number of those parts, or if lead-time is important. For most people designing stuff, led-time is essential, but not everybody that want some specific part designs it.
I decided to install arch once. Didn't have any issues per se, but spent far too much time going through all the window manager options, file browser options etc etc etc.
I eventually decided that I needed an os to do stuff, not be the stuff to do.
I just recently started to customise my Powershell profile. Let's see where this leads...
I just use a premade Debian rather that selecting every single tiny piece.
If I need to change things I can, I just don't feel I have to change everything.
Nowadays I'm using Code with the Vim plugin and I haven't tinkered with my config for quite some time.
Emacs is infinitely more powerful - but with Code I was able to set it up once and be done, and there's value in that too.
Having a 3d printer now, I can get a half dozen iterations on something done in a day and compared to a single iteration per day from the library. So if you're designing your own parts and can't draw them perfectly first go, having the printer is huge.
Replacement battery covers for remote controls. If I value those at $200 each, I've broken even.
If you are lucky enough to have a neighbour to do the commissioning, maybe, but otherwise shipping has gotten so expensive (at least in these parts), and 3D printers so cheap, that a getting few design iterations in your hands will practically buy you the printer.
My woodworking setup for my garage, however. Someday it will see use other than for organizing my woodworking setup in my garage. I just need that one more tool. And to build a place to put it.
Though I do think there can be another aspect at play; I often find myself collecting things that I think "might be useful". Eg: I have a ton of empty yogurt containers, for use in hypothetical future art projects. I do use them sometimes, but at this point I have plenty. I still feel the urge to keep saving them, though — for some imagined future. I wouldn't say "I enjoy collecting yogurt containers," though.
I'm no hoarder, but I do feel a certain pull/compulsion in that direction from time to time, and I could see the same being true elsewhere. It's not always easy to know whether I'm scratching an itch or worrying at it.
It's purely acquisitive and about the buying and getting and just seems quite sad and empty. Those afflicted become slaves to the companies pumping out items purely for this class of consumer. For example, "limited editions" and such are not rare because the product warrants it, it's just designed scarcity to press the buttons of the collectors and extract the most money from them. Or it's bidding wars on vintage items like wine where huge price inflation happens just for the collection kudos not the virtues of the item itself.
For example, I like fountain pens, but I can't really read r/fountainpens because it's mostly people building huge collections of pens and getting excited about buying a new pattern or colour of pen they already own. Nothing makes me sadder than seeing their full collections of 100s of fantastic tools that will sit idle for the vast majority of their life until the owner passes and a relative has to liquidate things they don't understand.
It looks like a dysfunction to me - a stimulation seeking addiction which is not satisfied by the next acquisition and will never fill the emptiness, the need, the dream, of the collector. I know people will be super defensive about their collecting but I would love for that money and energy to be redirected towards higher degrees of self-actualisation. It feels like a failure to scale the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and get stuck in a loop down the bottom. Instead of creating novelty or growing, there is something safe, comfortable and unchallenging to just acquire.
now that my rant is over would you like to see my extensive collection of Star Trek memorabilia plates? The paint is toxic so we cannot eat from them so i just leave them in this box and bring it out when guests come over.
It's hard to choose the line between "don't yuck someone else's yum" and not wanting to endorse others' self-destructive tendencies.
Part of me wants to chastise you for gatekeeping other people's enjoyment[1], but I do agree that it can slip into dysfunction, and also agree that some companies downright push people in that direction (looking at you, microtransactions).
The Lego I would put in its own category because it was endlessly fascinating and rebuild-able. I used it all the time. The dinosaurs were at least educational.
But the keyrings were just hoarded and gathered dust. I'm trying to decide now if this was unhealthy and trained me to covet stuff, or if it was a good inoculation against the behaviour later in life. I now have zero interest in collecting anything just for the sake of collecting it. I'd rather be minimal where possible, and after accumulating a lot of crap in my early 20s (when owning stuff was a novelty) I now also try to avoid the "I might use that someday" trap.
I too like fountain pens and have about six, moderately priced, all made by 'Cross'. I put various coloured inks in them (I usually have about 3 good to go at any one moment) and ... I virtually never hand write anything.
The thing I have most of is certainly cables and tech widgets of various descriptions, but I don't try to collect them, somehow they just sort-of happen.
Make of that all what you will.
Mmm. That does remind me of the quite nice social interaction some types of collecting gives. For example, a neighbour was a thimble collector so whenever visiting somewhere, we would look for a thimble. It gave us some entertainment as a tourist, like a treasure hunt, and then the nice moment to give it to the neighbour and show we were thinking of them while away.
It can go wrong though. I've known a few friends who have become associated with "a thing" because their family saw they owned one of "the thing" and now it's the exclusive theme of all presents but they don't have the heart to correct them and reveal all their presents were unwanted!
On the “associated” thing - not so much about collections but there was an interesting article on the guardian website a few months ago, about a woman who came to realise that ‘I like Prosecco’ was not a substitute for a personality, but she had run with it for so long that that was all she ever got as a gift, and she discovered her friends knew very little else about her. A one-dimensional character trap.
That makes me think that someone who is a hobby cable collector must have the easiest time of it!
People do collect all sort of non-expensive things (pebbles, seashells, ...) so it feels like just a coincidence that collecting pens means also collecting a lot of tools that will never be used.
As an adult, I go by the motto of “Don’t save the candles”, which is to actually use the things you buy, even the expensive cutlery and the scented candles.
So, yeah, I truly do not understand collecting Beanie Babies, Funko Pops, or fountain pens. But, I do collect coins. I find them interesting on multiple levels. I can't think of too many other hobbies that give one a good excuse to study history, economics, art, metallurgy, and more. So many things that happen involving humans and human societies also involve money and commerce. Going back to the rarity aspect, I own quite a few coins that are anywhere from quite scarce to truly rare. It also really helps that they don't take up a ton of space, either.
I don't see anything particularly maladaptive about it, except that it's a hobby that can take up arbitrarily much time and money. But, that's actually one thing I like about it: I could definitely have fun collecting coins on less than a $100/month budget, even though I actually spend quite a bit more than that on it. The acquisition process is fun as well. I like going to coin shops and coin shows. Buying online or at auction is slightly less fun, but it gives me a greater opportunity to find what I'm really looking for. When dealing with things that are, as I said, fairly scarce, the hunt itself becomes part of the enjoyment.
Not sharing this as a serious alternative, just sharing this as something nerdy and cool. It's a little more involved than coin collecting lol... but this guy making his own Carnyx (Celtic war horn) ticks many of those boxes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWTFIDAbDtY
A Carnyx being played:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRIQp4qZrrE
Engaging with history in very practical ways like this is very cool. I'd love to make my own Round House one day.
More of a business than a hobby, but still.
Like you, this isn't the mass market consumerism type of collecting, but is maybe a bit closer to it than your idea of somehow getting a working PDP-11.
So, I've done the next best thing... Thanks to Termux and SimH, I run one in my Android phone. I can telnet into it and log in, not quite the VT100 experience, but close enough. So for the low price of about 4GB of storage, I have a VAX 11/780, running OpenVMS 7.2 in my pocket. ;-)
Me too. Thankfully, buying old PDP-11 manuals on eBay and assembling a PiDP-11 satisfied that urge. I also live close to two good computer museums that have plenty of PDPs to poke around on, when they're working. Watching the graybeards diagnose and fix things on these 50+ year old machines reminds me why I don't want to do that at home.
In all likelihood, you and I find collecting sad and empty because we’re not collectors. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For all we know, collectors have found more fulfillment than we will ever know.
Undoubtedly for some it is a dysfunction; but for most, I suspect it taps into something common to most of us and is encoded by our evolutionary past given that for most of human prehistory we were equipped to deal with scarcity. For many with collecting hobbies, the target items are very specific and their practices don’t preclude moving effectively through life.
There are differences as well. Magnitude is the obvious one, unless you actually filled your entire kitchen with yogurt containers or something lol. :) The other big one I can think of is that an actual hoarder will have genuine, severe anxiety at the mere thought of getting rid of anything from their hoard. This is another assumption, of course, but my guess is that if you had to get rid of some, or maybe even most of your accumulation of yogurt containers for some reason, you'd be able to do that, and the thought wouldn't fill you with dread or anything.
Every once and a while I'll try to curate my parts bin, tossing bulky or unused items that I haven't needed.
Every time I find myself needing some seemingly dumb part from what I got rid of a month or two later.
I still try to clean up, fully knowing I'll need that thing later. Its rough.
Still can be annoying, though.
I do. About any collecting hobby. I view that more as an addiction than a hobby tbh.
A person with GAS does not enjoy collecting; they do end up collecting, but it's a side effect.
Buying artificially scarce dead trees isn't really the same.
1) "Save _all_ the things!" Yeah, save them, use them, etc.
2) Use it or lose it: I have a space under the sink for washed/clean plastic containers. If that gets too junky, it's time to throw them out in the trash, offer them "free" on craigslist/facebook marketplace, your neighborhood group, whatever.
3) Regularize: we've ended up with strict "use cases" after saving "_all_ the things!". Sour cream containers become waste-grease-buckets for the freezer. Glass spaghetti jars become candy/cookie containers. Peanut-butter-jars become nail/screw holders in the garage.
4) Limit the flow: Once you "run out of space", keep only one or two "on hand" if it's a particular type of jar that you know you will "flow through". Basically you should reach a steady-state of using the stuff you're saving rather than growing your "cache" unbounded. Unless it's a really useful/valuable/unique type of box/jar/product, get rid of it! Even if it's awesome (but unique), probably get rid of it, b/c it'll end up being "the odd one out" unless you have a really specific need for it.
5) re-Regularize: is there a certain type/brand of spaghetti-jars that are soooo awesome, because they fit on a shelf, have the right size opening, etc. etc.? Start consolidating around one particular type (as you "flow through" them) and getting rid of the oddball ones.
6) Front-door, back-door: Put things by the front door if they're going to be given away, sold, donated, etc. Put things by the back door if they're destined for the trash. Make those decisions and then take action on them as you can.
There's a lot of value in saving some of this "stuff" from the waste-stream, and lots of pleasure to have all your other "stuff" organized in solid plastic containers (that you ended up kindof paying "nothing" for)... just don't fall victim to the "save everything", instead know that you can just "stretch out your hand" and grab the things you need _when_ you need them, not _if_ you need them. :-)
Source: I wanted a set of the Volca electronic instruments, but the secondhand market was not significantly cheaper than new.
GAS is a form of delusion. You are asking people to “just” self-recognize and somehow self-fix their deeply rooted psychological problems.
To re-imagine the situation, they would have to give up the original goal of the hobby.
Both of those companies have this concept that's called a "registry set," which is where you can go on their websites and enter the serial numbers of coins you own, then create virtual sets out of those coins. You can create your own set lists, which I have no problem with, but there are also pre-made set lists the company created, which are scored according to a rarity-weighted average of the numerical grades of your coins, with a score of 0 for any missing coins. For instance, there's a Buffalo nickel registry and a wheat penny registry, and so on.
I think you can probably see where I'm going with this now. Before these companies came into existence and started publishing rankings of these sets, you couldn't really do something like say "@gilleain has the #1 ranked Buffalo Nickel set in the world," and such. Now you can, and it really annoys the piss out of me. It's not because my collection doesn't rate very highly (it doesn't, FYI), but because I think "competitive coin collecting" is bad for the hobby and only serves to make those 2 companies money.
Totally agree that this 'gamification' of collecting is an unpleasant way to monetise something that is otherwise quite a chill pursuit.
From the companies point of view, of course, it means collectors are more likely to try and 'finish' collections. Like how some card collections (I think?) would have books that you would put your cards in, which gives an endpoint to achieve.
edit: I lie, I do technically have a single coin I suppose. A 1918 silver 'threepenny bit' (3p coin) from a Christmas Pudding. King George V's head on it. Forgot it was in my wallet.
If you want to reach the level of @gilleain you have to obtain the coins he has. Coin collecting is based entirely upon owning resources.
On the other hand let’s say that a guy collecting coins has built a very popular YouTube channel about numismatics. He has his own collection and talks about it. You are envious of his success and you want to become just as popular as him.
A person without GAS would think that in order to achieve this he would have to learn a lot about numismatics and then improve in his ability to speak and entertain.
Someone suffering from GAS would think that acquiring the guy’s collection is the solution and would blame his lack of popularity not on his skills but on his resources
It started as a deeply rooted necessity. If you want to get through a winter that you don’t know the severity of, you better have above-average stocks of food and wood, plus stuff to repair your home if a severe storm strikes, plus extra winter clothing in case the winter is truly severe or your house burns down, and you’ve got to flee to your family, a few days walking away.
I used to do a lot of DIY software when I first got started, that I now deeply question the value of. I think without the imaginary payoffs, I would have only done about a quarter of it for fun. I don't use any of that code now, nor do I write anything similar on a regular basis, and my entire approach to coding is completely different, so it kind of feels like I was throwing time and money away.
I have a similar litmus test: assuming you’re going to fail, how do you want to spend your time?
But when you design a project I a way that's not appropriate for your resources, and it becomes an overwhelming pile of bugs, because you tried to do something really complex and reinvent 20 different wheels, it's less fun, unless you can polish it up to be like what you imagined, but that could take years depending on how crazy your idea was.
My point is: you didn't do anything wrong. The mere fact you're thinking about it reveals you've grown wiser for the experience. Kudos, friend. Thanks for sharing.
All of the above is fine, learning the history of and techniques in restoring things is cool.
You can work on a project, or you can work on a tool to make that project easier. A work-station, a jig, a library, a pod orchestration framework. Sometimes the new thing you've made will make the target project easier; sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and forget the project you were supposed to be working on as you start designing a new language to write a library in to write a database with that would suit your new project a lot better than SQLite.
Open any wood-working magazine, and half the projects are workbenches and shop organization.
I always thought old hand tools were kind of crap to use though until I cleaned up an old block plane and sharpened the blade. With a sharpened blade it made incredibly satisfying curls of wood on my next woodworking project, where I would have normally used my loud and unpleasant belt sander. I think I get it now why some people really love collecting old tools.
I feel like myself and my friends are aware of this.
GAS is the syndrome, and we talk about it to help keep ourselves in check and not lose sight of what we’re actually doing.
1. Doing the thing
2. Talking about doing the thing
3. Getting into the gear for doing the thing (collecting, building, customizing)
4. Talking about the gear for doing the thing
Very often, the first group is the smallest!
So what they do is the other 3, and wait for a random bolt of lightning, or a favorable judgment from the inscrutable supreme authority, or even declare that the "doing" is in fact the "talking etc".
It's an interesting bit of psychology for sure.
Sadly, the realization that you are not going to be a rockstar but a gear collector is likely to trigger a midlife crisis.
It's a hobby. There's no wrong way to do it. Have a budget and do what makes you happy. If that's accumulating gadgets, accumulate with joy. It's not an illness.
Another reason for what the article calls Gear Acquisition Syndrome, if not for Gear Fabrication Syndrome, is the nature of the learning curve for some things. For example, I'm learning electronics, slowly. Slowly because I have children and a stressful full-time job. A while ago I bought an oscilloscope. I don't really need an oscilloscope and it's possible I never will. I'm just hooking up 555 timers and trying to get my head round the mysteries of inductance at this stage. The machine is occasionally marginally useful, but mostly I get it out for the sake of fiddling with it.
Does this mean I just bought it for the thrill of owning it? I certainly felt that thrill when it arrived, but I bought it to learn how to use it, as part of the larger project of "learning electronics". My slow progress means it may be a long time before I'm doing things that really require it, but if and when that time comes I'll be ready, with the device and the knowledge to use it correctly (and not blow it up! [1]). I don't know how far I'll get in learning and applying this stuff, but learning the tools is a major part of it, and rewarding in itself.
Of course, just buying an oscilloscope in the course of learning electronics is not getting you in psychiatry. I mean, it is part of the basic toolkit, plus, you are actually using it. But if you start buying 5 different soldering irons with 10 different types of solder, every kind of pliers known to man, some very specific tool for some obscure use case you don't have, etc... it can negatively impact your quality of life, for example because of the clutter.
Which is a long way from 'throwing some disposable income at a hobby'.
If your 'gear acquisition' is getting you in debt, or excessively cluttering your home, you may have a problem. But otherwise, if you can afford it, and it's giving you some satisfaction to collect and fiddle with it, then why not?
Spending, say, $25k on hobby gear might seem excessive. But people don't get shamed for spending far more than that replacing/upgrading cars when they've got a perfectly decent one already.
And if you're buying quality gear, whether it's tools or musical instruments/equipment, it's likely to have a lifetime of several decades, it's not like you're buying junk that'll end up on a mountain of e-waste in a couple of years time.
Hoarding syndrome happens gradually. It may appear normal for a while to an outside observer, until it’s not.
I think the hallmark of problematic collection would be how much someone holds onto a device when physical constraints for their home are met.
Similar to how it has long been recognized that modern lifestyle has a negative impact on our physical health if we are not mindful of it, we should start paying attention to mental health. The COVID Lockdowns were a wakeup call for many people.
They should, considering the personal and external costs. Car lust keeps people on treadmills of debt. Manufacturing big metal blocks on wheels is not friendly for the physical and social environment either.
I find a good circuit simulator helps in speeding up the hassle in 'probing' electronics - there's many out there, I do like this one though https://www.falstad.com/circuit/
An Oscilloscope is a pretty reasonable thing even for a beginner, it's totally unnecessary but it does make things easier, it's something you'll probably actually use.
I had GAS/GFS pretty bad when I first got into electronics. Most of the stuff I regret buying was all pretty simple though. Cables can be a real big offender. I hate nonstandard cables with obscure connectors because they take up so much space for one function!
Digital electronics is far easier and requires less parts, but analog can still be really light on parts.
Electronics GAS seems to come in the form of "Big ideas" driven by bulk discounts. It's easy to imagine yourself doing ten projects over the next few years, all using some common set of parts.
But then some new and better thing comes out, and your pile of XT60 extension cords you made is forgotten.
The problem got so bad for me that I pretty much just chose to stop messing with random parts and instead explore the limits of what can be done with extremely common stuff.
Like, one time I bought some RCA jacks because it seemed like a good idea to use for switch inputs and the like.
But 2.1mm power jacks are even more common, and I can use resistors to protect against accidentally plugging in a wall wart to a sensor port.
Everyone likes lab power supplies, but can I redesign my circuit to run on a USB-C breakout trigger module? I've already got phone chargers laying around.
0.1" headers aren't perfect. It's easy to mis-connect something. It's easy to come up with some new unified standard for using JST connectors that will make all your stuff compatible... but then you have a project that doesn't work well with it...
When I first saw a commercial install made of random Amazon modules, I thought "They shoulda made a PCB" and I had all these ideas.... but then I realized that when the random Amazon modules breaks, I can swap it in a few minutes, and fix it later if I want.
With a custom board, I can't fix it at all until I've first discovered how it works, which will probably take an hour just to find out what pin does what when the documentation is gone....
Now I mostly start every project with an ESP32 module and go from there!
I have learned about Mini-PV connectors, which are compatible with P=2.54mm headers and do not loosen up over time: https://www.mattmillman.com/info/crimpconnectors/dupont-and-...
> When I first saw a commercial install made of random Amazon modules, I thought "They shoulda made a PCB" and I had all these ideas.... but then I realized that when the random Amazon modules breaks, I can swap it in a few minutes, and fix it later if I want.
I can see this, and I've definitely created custom circuit boards for devices that I only need one of & would be straightforward to build with random modules.
But at the same time, for a commercial product or a product where quantities of > 10 exist, making a circuit board makes a lot of sense, introduces a lot of reliability and saves significant cost. It's really not hard anymore to make a PCB, and there's so much opportunity for error & poor connections when assembling things from Amazon crap.
PCBs easy to make, and probably worth it a lot of the time, but there's also some pretty nice module options. Seems like going straight for PLCs is pretty common these days.
Mini-PV looks really nice! I'll have to check that out!
For dealing with commercial stuff on random cable standards, a lot of the time I'll get a pigtail and use Wago lever nuts to connect it to a longer cable, so it's easy to swap out stuff and make up whatever cable I need at the moment.
I've ever wagoed an 0.1" pigtail before, it works fine as long you keep the big heavy thing you're wagoing it to from pulling too hard.
Some people seem to like bananas for quick connections in the lab... but they are so easy to get wrong. A cheap banana plug last I checked was kind of bad.
The gears are mod0.8. 40, 20, 12, 10 and 8 teeth. I cut the bevel gears and the pinions out of 3mm brass sheet stock while the larger wheels are cut out of 0.7mm brass stock. (Why this modulo? That was the smallest gear family my prusa 3d printer could print reliably, and i guess i just stuck with it as i transfered to cutting brass) (Why this stock thicknesses? That is what amazon had in next day delivery :))
I design the mechanism and create the cutting toolpaths in fusion 360. The paths are 2d profile cuts for the straight pinnions and wheels, and 3d profile cuts for the bevel gears. For the bevel gears I have a “roughing pass” with a 1.7mm bit followed by two passes with a 0.8mm bit. This seems to be needed otherwise as the tiny bit steps “down and out” it encounters too much depth on the “outside” of the cut. At least that is how I explain it. What is certain that when i tried to cut the bevel gears with a single pass the 0.8mm bit broke all the time, and with this strategy I can cut all four of my bevel gears with the same two cutters. :) The pinions and wheels with straight walls I cut with a single pass.
I take 0.1mm deep cuts with 45mm/min feed, altough truth to be told I have tried 250mm/min feeds also and that seemed to be fine too. 350mm/min broke the bit too often.
I run the spindle at a constant max speed, which I have measured to be 27000rpm unloaded. Haven’t measured during cutting but somehow I doubt the dewalt with all its 900W slows down at allwith these tiny bits and cuts.
For work holding I use the following “sandwitch”: a 6mm thick aluminum plate is toe clamped to the bed of the CNC. There is blue painters masking tape glued on the aluminium waste board, super glue on that and the brass stock is held on by that super glue.
I start the cuts 0.3mm above the stock and finish it 0.3mm bellow. I probe the stock’s surface, back the bit up until it breaks the contact and zero it there. The gears I cut are small enough that i don’t seem to benefit much from z-scanning the surface of the stock. I use Universal GCode Sender to send the gcode generated by fusion.
Sorry for the lot of detail, just wrote what I wished have known a few months ago. Let me know if there is anything else you are currious about.
It's fun reading what other people are using these for in practice, and not just the sunny days version. If I ever try cutting brass with this level of detail and scale, this is exactly the kind of thing I'd want to read first.
I look forward to seeing your next project come to life!
Incidentally, your workholding is called a paper joint in woodworking, and is used to make split turnings and sometimes to attach clamping cauls :-)
Oh, thank you for asking. It is a fantasy planet system from the role playing world of Critical Role. It has a tiny brass cold cast planet with continents in the center of it. Two moons “orbit” around that on slanted orbits. A smaller red one and a bigger greyish one, these are realised as two semi-precious stone beads. The mechanism has two pairs of brass bevel gears and three pairs of brass reducing gears to achieve the cannonical 1:6 speed ratio between the moons.
Better shown in a video: https://youtu.be/zOOXRaQLdMs?si=cDCp2T-kjUETtRzj
> Can we follow your progress online?
Oh thank you. Not much of a progress is expected anymore. I have finished it yesterday, boxed it up and now I am on my way to the london comiccon to gift it away.
The next project is going to be a real world orrery of the Gallilean moons if I can manage it. Will try to get better at uploading progress reports periodically. I guess that youtube channel is the best one to follow if this is of interest to anyone.
D'oh!!
It's a huge money drain, but fun even if it doesn't ultimately get you anywhere ;)
I think it might be the fact that anything decorative or artistic needs post processing anyway, so a few layer lines aren't a big deal, and that I enjoy CAD design and trying to make functions parts work without relying on precision.
I would like to quiet the fan and steppers a bit though!
GAS/GFS sounds like a regular Tuesday on ADHD. I want to play a racing sim. Better learn intricate details of electronics, physics and car mechanics so I can build my own brake pedal. Is the brake pedal working? No. Have I spent even a single minute playing a racing sim since starting this project? Also no. But I have taught myself how to build my own 3D printer from scratch and I also never will do that ever again.
For example I like blacksmithing. Built a simple sword just grinding the metal, then decided to study how to get a proper forge and whatnot. Studied a lot, learning the chemistry of steel, found where to buy the stuff. Never bought it, never made any forged item.
Then I decided to go for armor making, using rings. Started making one, got stuck because the rings were too rigid and I wasn't strong enough... and that is it, it ended there.
So music then? Spent years learning how to compose music with a teacher that actually taught famous musicians, made my own cables to attach a keyboard to my computer, bought software, learned how to use trackers, became "friends" (as in... I don't talk much to them, but when I do they actually listen and give me small favors) Siren (musician from Unreal series) and Virt (musician from a lot of newer indie games, like Shovel Knight). How much music I made? 0. People at the church asked me if I can play my keyboard in public while people sing hymns. I replied I actually, never tried that.
Dumped a ton of money in magic the gathering cards. Made a point when moving country, of bringing them with me, half of my airplane baggage limit was MTG cards. Last time I played? Several months ago, almost a year I suppose.
The list keeps going and it is driving me nuts, I feel like I am wasting my life. I am not studying hard enough to improve my job performance, I am not studying the bible as I should either, I keep promising myself I will do it and then I don't. And again keeping with the theme of GAS, I actually spent a lot of money buying access to theology online classes and seminars, and didn't watch any of it.
You shouldn't do anything. It's your life and you live it like you want. All morals, shoulds and shouldn'ts and musts and mustn'ts are a pile of horseshit. You are only responsible to yourself and you are going to be the person judging yourself in the end. When somebody tells you you should go to church, it's about the same importance as if they asked you to play CoD with them.
And if you are bothered that you did not finish something... circle back to it. You have decades of life to purse your happiness. Relax, enjoy the detour and circle back with more knowledge and savings.
It's not that she hates what I'm doing or nags about it, it's just that she'll ask the hard questions. The ones I avoid like the plague.
"What are you going to use it for? .. Ok, cool, so how long will you need? .. So, have you been making progress? Why not? Why are doing something else and wasting time while there is still work to do? .. You are switching around a lot and it seems you are avoiding finishing what you started.. Have you considered therapy?" At this point I'm like, damn girl, you're right. What am I doing.
After a while I learned to ask myself those questions and get some discipline into my (hobby) life.
I have a project that I worked on for a few months, then one and a half years later I worked on it during a national holiday, noticed a pretty big flaw, threw 25% of the code out to rewrite it and then suddenly it was usable!
Anything that is half-finished is also half-done!
They do have trouble holding down jobs and not hyper-focusing on their leaky faucets for two weeks straight without eating or sleeping much and talking about it non-stop while somehow not fixing it.
Yet, myself, no ADHD in sight. Other things, sure, but no ADHD and I have a knack of disappearing into black holes and emerging with "stuff"/"knowledge". I dislike synth music, but have programmed a modular software synth because I wanted to know how it works. Never touched it again. I know it now, there is no pay off in using it. That's boring and I'm no musician.
I'm not completely convinced this is an "ADHD" thing. I think this is a personality thing. INTP or something like that? You are just a "tinkerer". Getting stuff done is boring. Learning how stuff works is where the fun is at.
Look, hobbies are for your enjoyment. If buying gear or trying to build it yourself gives you joy, more power to you.
I for one like to buy power tools just as much as the next guy. And often times it's hard to justify falling for a good sales offer when you don't really have a specific need for that tool at that point in time. But on the flip side, there have been quite a few moments where I was tinkinering about with some home improvement projects and a tool I might have bought a long time ago and never really needed since came in handy just at that very moment. And so I was glad I had it. Especially since I don't live very close to the next DIY store. So, yeah, is that a good justification for spending money on power tools? Probably not - but it's what I like, and so I do it.
The acquisition of gear (be it buying or building) is not a means to an end - it is part of the hobby.
I'm not sure that anyone is proposing that.
> A good counter example could perhaps be table top wargaming, e.g. Warhammer and the likes. Surely, people who call that their hobby like to play the (various different) games. But a lot of people love building and painting their miniature armies just as much.
That sounds perfectly reasonable if the split between crafting and playing is somewhere near the middle. However, in the case that they hardly ever actually engage in a game, I'd maintain that their hobby is not 'wargaming' and is actually model making.
If you enjoy building and painting miniatures then it's not wrong. It's a different hobby from wargaming though.
> Look, hobbies are for your enjoyment. If buying gear or trying to build it yourself gives you joy, more power to you.
Sure. But a lot of people find themselves accumulating a closet full of junk that was supposed to help with a fun part that they never actually get around to. Which is really just another form of consumerism; while I'm open to the idea that some kinds of collecting can be good hobbies, there's definitely a kind of pseudo-hobby of buying things that all too often ends up as an addiction-like behaviour that doesn't actually bring people much joy or satisfaction.
> The acquisition of gear (be it buying or building) is not a means to an end - it is part of the hobby.
If it brings you joy, yes. If it just quiets the cravings for a while, no.
See, and here I disagree, and I think at least a non-trivial number of players would too.
> If it brings you joy, yes. If it just quiets the cravings for a while, no.
Too hard to reliably distinguish between the two.
Good for them! They are not the ones we should be concerned about.
> Too hard to reliably distinguish between the two.
It's probably hard to distinguish from the outside, but it's important to cultivate that skill [edit: to evaluate one's own habits] if living in a consumerist society where most cravings can be satisfied by going to a shopping mall or to an online store.
For Warhammer, specifically, that's maybe why I've heard the term 'plastic crack' ... That is, buying large amounts of miniatures that never get painted.
(Always paint your bases!)
If you're going to bother, then one of the biggest things is to rigidly attach the pedals to the seat so that they cannot move in relation to the seat even against the full power of legs.
And of course car pedals swing on a pivot that is above the pedals not below, although the gas pedal has an extra linkage so that IT does pivot on the bottom.
Clutch and brake (not break) require full leg power and knee bend, only gas is purely ankle bend, calf power.
And if such details don't matter, then you're right back to the off the shelf one.
It is indeed what I’ve always seen on production road cars, but I don’t see why it’s necessarily true for all cars.
Granted, the DS is perhaps the weirdest production car ever made in large numbers.
As for pedal mounting location, many pedals can be top or bottom mounted if your racing chassis allows for it. However, floor mounted pedals offer the same performance as top mounted, match the majority of purpose built racing cars, and are simpler to mount in a sim racing chassis.
"GFS" describes the hobby vs the gear, but hobbyists will also find themselves somewhere along the "doing" vs "discussing" axis as well.
I'm also old enough (40+ years experience as a dev) to actually objectively measure the impact this trait has had on my career.
I'll summarize in one simple sentence: any negative feeling / worry /guilt you may have because you discover you have that "penchant": discard it with utmost prejudice.
I have had an amazing career in tech. (not over yet). Most of it has been self-propelled by the things I've learnt because of GFS-type propensities.
On the other hand, teaching others stuff that doesn't (by itself) stimulate you anymore gives you an opportunity to check the quality of your understanding and is also fun in itself.
Another way to finish is to build a birthday gift and thus impose a deadline on yourself.
Or perhaps I’m just coping and telling myself that to deny that I have really bad attention and impulsivity issues
Never heard of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) or Gear Fabrication Syndrome (GFS), but I think it would be better to replace Gear with Gadget. From I saw with a quick search, GAS is heavily related to musicians, but I think this applies to all areas (photography, computing, astronomy...).
A little bit off topic... Is it only me that finds the scrolling area of this page annoying? What's the point of having all this screen estate and allowing scrolling only if the mouse is over the middle section?
I think you can compare most collections to fashion. Some people collect based on color or fabric. Others on quality of manufacture. Or on quality of fit. Then we have brands and finally pure hysteria—something you won’t wear, but only desire to own.
This explains keb collectors and someone who owns Jimi’s actual fx pedal. The DIYer could just be an aficionado of manufacture or perfect fit.
My2c
I think that building frameworks is just a lot more fun than doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is usually a soul-sucking grind of boring enterprise tickets.
If one is so insulated from the actual business problem by corporate bureaucracy it may be the only way for developers to do something that matters to someone, no matter how frivolous it is in the grand scheme.
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As for actual gear fabrication, I used to make gears, mostly bevel gears, but also some spur and helical gears, as well as gear like objects. Since bouncing out of the field (due to long covid) it is only lack of budget that has kept me from trying to build/acquire gear to be able to make gears myself at home. I really want a pocketNC.
I'm convinced I could find a way to Power Skiving[1] straight bevel gears, which should be impossible(because the pitch of the gear teeth varies continuously across the distance from the central axis), with sufficient budget and time.
It's fun to tinker, and that's the reward in itself.
... was disappointed :-)
That being said traditional GAS, as in people that buy a ton of stuff in the hunt for the perfect tone falls often into two categories (or any mix of the two):
1. People whose motivation for the hobby is coupled to these purchases
2. People who don't completely understand all the contributing factors
A good example is Hifi-Heads who will spend upwards of 400 Euros for a simple cable and tell you they can hear what the best measuring equipment known to humanity can't measure, yet they fail to do even the most basic acoustic treatment to their listening space.
Guitar players can be similar, only there one big variable are the players themselves. Also they often fail to understand that every guitar tone they want to imitate is typically a recording of a guitar tone. That means the whole microfone/mixing desk/effects/recording media/mastering chain is part of that sound. So even if you you traveled back in time and had the possibility to sit with Hendrix in the studio, it probably wouldn't sound like it did on the record. And if he gave you the chance to play his guitar and his amp it would still not sound like him, because the magic (or the lack thereof) is in the fingers.
That being said, it is good and useful to have goals for certain sounds, but the way to achive them rarely is a very specific set of (typically obscenely expensive) gear — the trick is to understand your instrument, yourself and the whole signal chain intricately, or on the recording side of things: To work with people who have both that understanding and an appreciation for the sound you are aiming for (just like Hendrix obviously did).
On the Synth end of things I know people who are more into "collecting" these things than using them. These are the people who spend more time researching their next synth or module than they spend on actually learning how to use what they got.
I don't want to judge, it is all about the dopamine in the end, but as someone who enjoys the act of making music — a hobby that arguably needs a ton of stuff, depending on what you do — I always think a too crazy focus on gear takes away from that. And I say that as someone who constructs some of these circuits.
For sure there are gains to be made by having proper material as opposed to entry level, but those quickly become marginal.
The biggest gains by far are usually found in working on your driving style. Have a look at telemetry of someone who's slightly faster and work out the differences methodologically.
Shameless self-promotion: if you're racing in iRacing, have a look at https://garage61.net, we have over 125 million laps of telemetry to learn from.
In the last two years I have completely moved my desktop configuration into Ansible making it near perfectly reproducible on another machine. My thinking was it would make me more productive in the long run.
But rather then spending some of my free time working on some of the other actual software ideas I have accumulated over the years, instead that time goes into endless tinkering with the playbook and trying to add even more to it.
For GFS, making gear instead of music etc can still be the product. Additionally, if one understands how something works, it could make them better at applying that gear.
[insert a string of like 100 sobbing emojis.]
I last made a Throttle for a HOTAS setup. Key was I had a functional end to end prototype using Arduino, ultrasonic sensor, and drawer slide in 3 hours and started using it immediately.
Every piece of the prototype was eventually replaced and my "final" version is a mess of wires and incomplete, but I got use out of the early versions as a proof of concept early and never bought the off the shelf alternative.
But I've got all the parts for Mu-Tron III clone that have been sitting in the boxes they came in for a year now and haven't had the time to start. I could have had a commercial one to play through in that amount of time.
I hear it’s also big in outdoor hobbies—backpackers often make their own tents and packs too.