RogerN -- making money from metalworking at home

A great deal depends on the nature of the business.   I operated a one man
shop for 16 years, serving the defense and aero-space industries, along with
a respectable amount of work for the pharmaceutical industry.    The shop
was my sole source of income for the entire duration of the run.   I closed
the doors only because I chose to (my hobby of refining precious metals have
become a business, although inadvertently).

Running my shop, my income was far better than it would have been had I been
an employee, but I was also well disciplined.    One can not own a shop and
work four hours daily and expect to survive.   One must also be very quality
conscious, which may be a big call, considering the majority of individuals
in this country are now oriented to making a buck instead of performing at a
satisfactory level.   On that note, I attribute my success to that very
thing.  For me, it was more important to turn out quality than it was to
make money.  YMMV.

By the way, my humble machine shop was in a one car garage. Think about
that, then consider the obstacles I had to overcome to get approved for
defense work.   It CAN be done.

Harold

I have no intention of quitting my day job and would probably turn away work
if I had trouble keeping up.

On the other hand, I'm underemployed and don't see any jobs available in the
area to better utilize my abilities.  Trying to think of the "perfect" job
for me that I would be capable, interested, and enjoy doing, I had the idea
of designing, building, operating, and maintaining highly automated
equipment.  Perhaps imagine something like an automatic bandsaw and robot to
load and unload a machine.  I'd be doing setup, feeding a bar into the
machine occasionally, and mostly inspecting parts, measuring, changing
inserts, and fixing it when it didn't work correctly.  The same ideas could
work with an injection molder or whatever process is desired.  I wonder if
anyone's doing home shop aluminum extrusions?  :-)  I guess the bottom line
would be that if I was a one man shop, I'd want to try to use automation to
be as productive as possible.

The job I did that paid for most of my shop was fairly productive, I had a
home brew CNC table on one mill cutting parts while I was manually making
other parts on another mill.  I'd change the part, hit start, then go to the
manual mill and work until the CNC needed the part changed again.

RogerN