Is there any money in this?

[Matt300ZXT]

So I'm curious, is there any money in the side-gig of investing in tools and building guitar bodies for people? When I was working with a luthier friend, he was showing me some stuff on how to glue the woods, plane them, route the bodies, etc. I'd say a capable cnc machine would be waaaaay out of consideration, but maybe a good saw, planer, clamps, templates, routers, and palm sanders aren't too bad to start off with. He said he would make decent money when he was doing it full time, sometimes even just selling the wood for someone to cut their own body out of. There is a lumber yard in town that has some nice wood from time to time.

 

[PDC]

Great thread starter. First off - do what you love and you never work a day in your life. If I could assemble and set up guitars for a living, I’d be in heaven. Second only to managing a strip club. ‘Is there money in this’ - let’s stick with that for a moment. Whether or not there is money in anything I think depends primarily on advertising and market share. I think it’s fair to say that Warmoth and Musikraft have big sections of the market for higher end, ‘you pick the wood and the options’ bodies. Behind them, Locke, KNE and Dive Bomb seem to have enough ‘market share’ to stay in business. After that, you’ve got Alparts and Mighty Mite for folks who are just looking for ‘off the shelf’ parts with no custom options.

I think the start up cost of the CNC Machine keeps a lot of would be players away from this game table. Cutting and finishing by hand is time and labor intensive - as compared to the working product that the CNC machine pops out. Once you necessarily limit the number of ‘finished’ bodies you can produce in any given 30 day period and then factor in the costs of advertising to make sure prospective buyers and builders are aware of your offerings, I think this is an uphill climb. Which is too bad. Maybe teaming up with one or 2 other ‘partners’ who know woodworking and know guitars would help offset some of the cost of doing business?

Not at all wanting to be ‘Debbie downer’ here. I would LOVE to step away from my current ‘career’ and do something that actually made me happy. And I am happiest disassembling - re-assembling and swapping parts on my home-built collection of spare parts guitars. I’d love to find a way to make that even marginally profitable.

 

[Laputan Machine]

No.
If you charge 80 bucks an hour for tech work it feels like you are making 80 bucks an hour.
If you charge $3k for a build it feels like you are making $3.00 an hour.
The market is completely saturated with small builders, and I don't know how it's even possible to keep the lights on doing that for less than $5k a build.
As far as building bodies goes, making them is fairly straight forward, but you'll be spending 30-50 bucks for the lumber to glue up a blank, takes about 3-4 hours to cut, rout one by hand with templates, then another hour of sanding to have it prepped as a sellable blank for something that you'd be lucky to get $200 bucks for. Add in all the consumables of doing that...make more money working at McDonalds.

 

[voodooradio1]

So I'm curious, is there any money in the side-gig of investing in tools and building guitar bodies for people? When I was working with a luthier friend, he was showing me some stuff on how to glue the woods, plane them, route the bodies, etc. I'd say a capable cnc machine would be waaaaay out of consideration, but maybe a good saw, planer, clamps, templates, routers, and palm sanders aren't too bad to start off with. He said he would make decent money when he was doing it full time, sometimes even just selling the wood for someone to cut their own body out of. There is a lumber yard in town that has some nice wood from time to time.

I make my own. If you plan to try to turn it into a business, I wouldn’t expect to generate a profit quickly. You will need the obvious equipment to get started, and it may actually be cheaper to go with a cnc machine. Beside a planer/joiner, you are going to need a quality band saw , that can handle resawing, or book matching quality bodies and tops, and those can be comparable in price to some of the cnc machines available today. I have hundreds of clamps in my shop ranging in price from a few bucks to over 100, and if I wanted to churn out multiple bodies, I would have to invest another small fortune in clamps alone. The easiest body to glue up, cut to shape and route is a tele. But if you want to succeed you will need to offer custom upgrades. Belly carves, binding, extended cut away all require an extra process that has to be set up. My advice would be to get a decent table saw, a jointer/ planer, and some decent sanding blocks. There are many hand tools that are needed in a wood shop, and the cheap ones are a waste of money, and the good ones are not cheap. Learn how to safely use all of your power tools. A table saw can fuck your world six ways from Sunday without cutting off a finger, so don’t mess around. Learn to build all of the jigs that you need in a wood shop. They help increase productivity, and make life easy. Use shit material while learning, and be ready to mess up a bunch. Try that first. It is a great hobby, and you can build stuff that will be around for your great , great , great grandchildren to use and enjoy. You may not get rich or even make ends meet with guitars, but knowing how to turn out a lot of different items can make money. I didn’t set my shop up for the purpose of making my living, but I have made some money just the same. Have built studio furniture, drum gobos, even an isolation booth. Not only got paid, but can book time in that studio free of charge with a pro engineer when I want it. Main thing is just not worry so much about what you don’t have or can’t afford, but learn to maximize what you have. YouTube is a great resource for ideas on shop equipment and wood working techniques. Good luck

 

[Geo]

I would think if you are making, say for example, 10 bodies at a time. It would lower the amount of labor. One body at a time would be a waste of time.

 

[rsm]

risky IMO; you stand to lose money over time before you break even, if you ever do.

lots of competition, many are well-known for custom builds, etc. unless you had a history in the industry (e.g., Suhr), get a few well-known players at least locally to grow organically takes time, etc. and the investment in tools and supplies.

Not impossible but you risk buying tools and equipment, plus depreciation, that will take time to even recover your initial investment, i.e. break even. If you buy a machine for $2K, for example. that may take 30, 50 or more bodies to pay for it, before you make $1 in profit.

 

[paulyc]

A used CNC mill can be had for 10 to 15 K, or even less. You don’t need anything expensive to make saw dust. But you need a large space and three phase power. Even a 5 to 7.5 HP electric motor draws a fair amount of current and will generate heat, so AC would be nice in the summer months.

 

[Laputan Machine]

You don't need three phase, you can use use a VFD. Affordable 2.2 kw gantry mills can be had for around $2.5k from China for making singular bodies/necks (this requires a bit of know how though to setup and run them).
You also need to learn how to run the CNC which is a massive undertaking and becoming competent with CAD/CAM and actually running one is a far bigger learning curve than using traditional methods of bandsaw/template routing. You also still need a good table saw ($2-5k), jointer ($2-5k) an planer ($2-5k) to make blanks. Then you still have to do a bunch of hand sanding anyways.
Companies like Warmoth have this figured out so well undercutting them would be impossible, and you'd most likely be making inferior products to them to boot.
IMO the only way to make money building guitars is to establish yourself well enough to get at least $5k a build, the time it takes to get to that point is years. There is a well known luthier that posts on TGP who makes great stuff, IIRC he gets about 4k a build, and he said it took him 5 years of being supported by his wife before he was making a paltry $45k a year.
Return on labor for building guitars is insanely bad. Less than minimum wage bad for most. Getting into furniture making is probably a much better way to proceed if you like building things out of wood. Way less precision needed, way less work per dollar earned, way larger customer base. And you aren't really competing with China/low wage/low regulatory countries as much since furniture tends to be larger/more difficult to ship over here.

 

[Stumplegriltskin]

Side gig doing carpentry part time. Couldn't do it full time as the quotes, materials, billing, drives me batshit crazy. The work is the easy part. I charge $400 a day usually and usually do day jobs. In and out. Sometimes I charge by the job. Last week I made $15000 cleaning and replacing dryer vents and putting cages on bath vent exhausts. 12 hours of work and $600 in materials. But the work is a grind, but there are tons of people out there that have had absolute hacks work on and fix. A lot of my work is re-doing what someone else already messed up.

I would not attempt to do guitar bodies unless I had a shop, and like mentioned, everybody and their brother is building guitars.

 

[VonBonfire]

Side gig doing carpentry part time. Couldn't do it full time as the quotes, materials, billing, drives me batshit crazy. The work is the easy part. I charge $400 a day usually and usually do day jobs. In and out. Sometimes I charge by the job. Last week I made $15000 cleaning and replacing dryer vents and putting cages on bath vent exhausts. 12 hours of work and $600 in materials. But the work is a grind, but there are tons of people out there that have had absolute hacks work on and fix. A lot of my work is re-doing what someone else already messed up.

I know this all too well. How to go from side gig to full time plus overtime gig instantaneously; just start saying yes to people. No is my default answer.