Building frames as an occupation
 

I am not the kind of person who is looking to get wealthy. I am gainfully employed as an electrician in houston Texas but to tell the truth its just a job and I am tired of working for someone. Ive looked into sime frame building courses (like yamaguchi) and though its expensive Learning anything from someone like that cant hurt. I love bikes, love riding, love mechanics, i just want to do something I like instead if grinding away at a trade for 40 years. I sort of want to dip my toes into building frames, sell some locally and see if its something I could turn into a small business. Are there any builders on here that were in the same place mentally and just changed directions?

It's like running a small machine Shop, Have all the machine tools and enough set aside to live on for a Few years

and Pay bills un till sales start coming your way ?

It really takes a pretty heavy commitment to build frames for sale. You owe it to your customers to have insurance, and that is going to cost you. I would like to dabble in it myself, but I can't see a way to do that

This thread from a couple of years ago may be helpful. Doug Fattic has offered excellent advice on the subject in several threads here.

Number crunching...... can a great frame-builder pay his mortgage?

I forgot about that thread, thanks for posting the link

Thank you for the link^^

Yeah. Make sure you have a day job you can live off of while you're learning. I dreamed of being an independent builder, and was lucky enough to acquire considerable experience building frames, and got tooling and fixtures at very reasonable cost, but then I got married, had children, etc., and the day job was always the highest priority. But I still have the fixtures and tooling and build frames for myself and close friends.

Strawberry shop tour is interesting and helps understand the capital investment one can make.

Andy got top notch tooling because He was the Importer of Marchetti from Italy , probably still sells it.

You don't owe it to your customers to have insurance, you owe it to yourself, you owe your customers a product that is unassailable perfect, and upon which no reasonable claim could ever be made, though the risk of a claim exists. Getting insurance is by the way, nothing like the same thing as getting a payout on it, whether for you, or in the fanciful case your customers claim and are made whole by a policy any bike builder could afford to pay.

Just had to cancel a family trip to the US because I couldn't get travel insurance because they have changed so many features they can't actually write it any more. Refreshing experience to have the agent tell me he could write it, but he had no idea if it would actually pay out. This despite the fact that the airwaves are full of travel insurance ads 24/7.

To the OP, it sounds as though a lot of your concerns could be eliminated simply by becoming your own boss as an electrician. You probably feel at a visceral level how easy it would be to do that. The chance of success in the trades is a lot easier than in what you are proposing as a frame builder. You would feel less used if you were your own boss, and you can deal with the boredom by hiring others which is the route to real wealth in the trades, along with figuring out what is the sweat spot in your trade and going for those jobs over and over. The richest guy in our neighbourhood who has waterfront property gallore, and a huge yacht, is a guy who does evestroughs, He franchises the trucks, and they show up, roll out a 30 foot piece from a roll of Al, and go up two ladders, 300 bucks.

Then you can reserve your hobby for your private time.

If you want to go ahead in some unpaying hobby field, find one without liability, unless you intend to have no assets, or don't at least have them now. If you own your house and car clear, don't take up framebuilding if you have a family to support.

One of the biggest pitfalls in building anything, and selling it is product liability insurance. If you have no accests, pension, saving in tthe bank, etc. You have zero too loose. If you have a few bucks, and some knuckle heads does something stupid, you will have a good chance of defending your product in a court of law.

Insurance is not just to protect you, it also protects the customer as well.

A few years ago a driver pulled in front of me while I was cruising my bike (motorcycle), which I then proceed to T-boned at 40 mph. The idiot driver had the state minimum insurance, which didn't even come close to covering my medical expenses.

Heavens forbid something goes wrong with a frame someone built, but if it did and the rider got hurt wouldn't you want to make sure the person is properly taken care of?

After my accident I upped my auto insurance to $1M for personal injury. Upping the limit was just an incremental cost on top of the regular insurance cost. Just hope to never need it.

Run the numbers from a business perspective.

Initial capital: Up front and projected capital costs for tooling, education. Know what you have to have on hand to get what you need when you start up. And plan additional capital costs for what you'll need as you grow.

Operating expenses: What salary will you need to live + expenses like insurance, utilities, consumables, rent, marketing, etc. Some of this will figure into your startup costs, but it will be more of a guide to...:

How many frames or complete bikes you'll need to sell per month/quarter/year to make it work as a going venture. Realistically estimate how many you could plausibly make in any given amount of time and see if it matches which what you'd have to make to survive. Don't forget that you have to sell the frames you build as well.

I looked into the framebuilding idea and the more I looked around at other frame builders, the more I saw that many or most had supportive spouses with decent jobs...

It's really tough making a living wage building bicycle frames unless you've built a number of frames as a hobbyist and have developed the skills to consistently produce safe, reliable, nice riding bikes.

I'm totally satisfied building just for myself; it's therapeutic and a lot cheaper than seeing a psychiatrist. ;)