Plan Ideas

When it comes down to it, the market might prove to provide a great time for people to be purchasing property. If you cannot seem to find a house that fits your individual style, or quite what you and your family had been looking for, than you might seriously consider the possibility to buy land in lieu of just buying a house.

There is good advice to be considered and pitfalls that can be avoided to make your experience a smooth one should you decide to buy land and build. This article will present some of the advantages of building the home you want on the property that is a bargain. You will walk achoice better prepared after reading about the challenges and opportunities involved.

The first thing that you’re going to have to determine is whether or not this would be a good financial decision to make. Buying land might be cheaper in many cases than buying a house, but if you are not sure what you are getting into, you can wind up spending much more money than you ever anticipated. This is going to require a good bit of planning from you.

While there are all kinds of things to consider, the first would be the fact that when you’re buying land you are not buying a house. So you have to either have a purchased home moved there, or be willing to build on the property that you have purchased. You are going to want to this all planned out before you commit to buying anything.

If you do engage in a construction project, then make sure that you supervise the staff that has been referred to you by your architect and your interior designer. If you do have a carpentry background you can help out with some aspects, but the most important thing to do is find out how the project is supposed to go and then be there to lend a hand and make sure to prevent project waste through active supervision.

Talk it out ahead of time and find out what everyone in the house wants and the layout that they would most like to see. You don’t want to be changing your mind halfchoice through the project, or determining that a particular set up is not good after it has been constructed.

There really are some advantages to buy land as opposed to just purchasing a house. This will give you the option to build your dream home on the land that you own. It is certainly something to consider if building a home interests you and your family.

I dont get it. Times are tough, yet for some reason, I cant find a machinist that will take on a small job.

Over the years I have produced a lot of one-offs; car parts, camera parts, tool parts and just plain weird stuff. Over this same timeframe, finding a machinist has become more and more difficult.

Years ago, machinists were a dime a dozen, most working out of horribly run-down buildings in the worst parts of town. You could tell a good machinist by the amount of metal scrap he had around his building. Stepping inside a machine shop was scary as hell. The vast majority - no - all of them that I ever visited were covered in decades of dirt and metal filings with stacks of material everywhere. You entered through a decrepit door and followed a wandering aisle between the junk and machines to find and talk to the owner, a cigar smoking, unshaven, filthy-overall-covered guy who talked to you like you were the last person in the world he wanted to deal with. But deal with you he did, making the part to your exact specifications and charging you a price that matched the time and materials he spent making them.

Fast forward to today, and things are completely different. Machine shops are now housed in buildings that equal IBMs head office, thats if you get to see the building at all. Mainly you deal with them through the Internet, attaching your drawings to forms that are more unfriendly than the actual human-variety of machinist of yore. If you are lucky, they will reply. If you are really lucky, their reply will include a quote. The one thing you dont need to count on luck for, though, is that the quotes you will receive will make the project ridiculously expensive and will force you to scuttle the whole idea.

Case in point is a project I am currently working on; a birthday present for my son. I cant state what it is here yet as sometimes he surprises me and actually checks out what his old man has to say on this blog, so I cant give the idea away before I actually give the result away, if you get my drift.

I have come up with an idea for what my old man used to call, a "dust collector". A dust collector is nothing more than something that looks good but doesnt do a damned thing, a concept my old man wasnt particularly enamoured with. For this particular dust collector idea, I need two steel discs, both 3" in diameter and 1/2" thick, each turned slightly different. It also requires 1 1/2" of 2 1/2" steel tubing. Attached is a drawing of how these three pieces are to fit together.


Of the 20 machine shops I sent out drawings to, 8 replied. Two of those that replied basically stated they were not interested in the job. The six actual quotes that I did receive ranged from a low of $275 to a high of $600.

$275 to $600 for three pieces of steel that I could buy at Metal Warehouse for less than $22. One piece, the steel tubing, requires no further working once it is cut to length and the remaining two parts are ones that I could turn myself in less than an hour if I had a simple metal lathe. If I, someone who works in metal once every 8 years or so, could turn these parts in less than an hour, someone who does this day-in and day-out should be able to do it in half that time. I get that, in business, you have to get a return on your capital investments, but give me a break for Gods sake. Lets say it takes an hour to make all three parts. At $275, that means the machine shop is charging $253 an hour and at $600, it becomes $578 an hour. Neither is a cost that reflects the companys investments. They just reflect gouging. No wonder work like this is going to places like China.

At first, I did Internet searches for machine shops within my geographical area, which turned out to be few and far between. Only 4 of the 20 quote requests went out to shops within the greater Toronto area. I then expanded my search to include machine shops in North America. The remaining 16 quotes went out to shops located throughout Canada and the United States. Surprisingly, out of the 8 that did respond with a quote, the most expensive were located in Texas and California. The cheapest was in Michigan while the two Canadian firms that replied came in with quotes of $325, still way to much for the work required, Canadian or not. In the end, I did send out one request for a quote to a company in China, but I havent heard back from them as yet. I am curious what they will come in at.

Given that this is the third project that has been scuttled by machinist quotes, I just might turn my attention to finding a little metal lathe for sale on eBay, one selling for the price of the lower quote for this particular job. If one turns up, Ill buy it and turn my own parts from now on and the hell with the new age of machinists.

I have always thought that the worst enemy of capitalism was capitalists. Now Im convinced.

Peace,

Mitchell

My wife made a new chore chart for the family out of a piece of 20"x30" foam board and asked me how we should hang it on the wall.  Ive been looking for an excuse to make a picture frame so I told her that I would take care of it.  She had already decorated the board and the writing at the top was all the way to the edge so I had to come up with a way to frame it.  My answer was to make a groove on the front of the board and just inset it in.  This made the job a little harder because I had to make that groove perfect to fit the board.  I just took my time and made several small cuts and inched up on it and I think that it turned out really good.