DIY Prinsu Top Rack Made on Wood Router

That looks pretty amazing!!
How many hours went into that?

 

I think you overestimate the wholesale discount. Most of these companies are still buying in pretty low volumes. You're right about the time. But you also didn't include time for ordering parts, maintaining inventory, shop cleaning, paperwork, receiving shipments, packaging/ship, etc.

Sure, there's use of modern equipment. But the more equipment you add to decrease labor, the higher your overhead. That's assuming they have an in house laser table (~$500k that needs to be paid for). Even so, it takes a lot of managing to run it. Obviously, you become more efficient than hand layouts and a router, but it only increases the overhead you need to pay for. The expense that goes into manufacturing the simplest things is astonishing. You are running a whole business. Imagine having to include the cost of your bathroom breaks in the cost of all your DIY projects. Every product a business sells has to cover wasted time by employees, the crazy amount of toilet paper that is used, cleaning products.....the shit gets crazy. I guess I'm just trying to point out that the numbers always favor DIY, if you ignore all these things. Next time you do a project, factor in the amortization of all your tools, rent/mortgage, every other thing you run your household (cleaning products, paper goods, maintenance, etc) , and your hourly rate at work (plus benefits and workers comp insurance) then you'd be approaching a cost that is comparable to what businesses need to do.

Anyway, I'll hop of the high horse and say that I DIY everything I can cause I'm a cheap ass. I encourage everyone to do as much for themselves as they can. Also, this rack turned out awesome.

Edit: I forgot taxes. Taxes suck. Not just paying them, but paying someone to manage all of it. Sales tax, business tax, payroll taxes. Just the management of that is expensive not to mention the actual taxes.

 

Dude I'm right there with you. I'm a cheap ass too. I think you did awesome. I hope my comments didn't offend anyone. I wasn't just trying to give some insight to how prices come to be and hope easily it can be to think companies are gouging the customers. The truth is that the cost to run a business is very high. Anyway, I look forward to seeing other projects from you. You clearly have skills.

 

I'm very impressed that you can cut aluminum with a router. I have one and never thought about it. Great job OP!!!

 

Lost me at “sure”.

Just kidding, I’m a tradesman myself and some don’t get what it takes to be self employed.

 

No offense taken! Honestly its cool to hear input from someone who is running a business. But thank you for the complement. This is not my first DIY mod and I hope to do a better job of putting together write ups in the future. Its very easy to take away information and ideas from this forum, complete a project, and move on without paying it forward with lessons learned/trick and tips. I told myself I would do a write up on this and here we are!

 

That’s why it’s called overhead. The cost of time your employees waste or how much toilet paper is used is not a cost that’s passed to the customer. If you offset those costs by increasing prices then you push your product out of the market.

Every product has a perceived worth and when prices exceed that, people begin to shop around or explore DIY.

We are seeing more and more of that.

 

Hmm hard to say. I really only worked on it on weeknights after work an hour here an hour there. I try and spend my weekends outside. I think thinking through everything took the most time. Its hard for me to even throw a number at it.

 

It's all passed to the customer indirectly. Otherwise you go out of business. Now to figure out a way to make the guys stop shitting so much.

 

Sorry, but that is not correct. Overhead is part of the total cost of anything you buy. Bare metal costs include TP for the peeps at the foundry.

 

There was an article about money saving tips that I read a long time ago. One tip was saving up the rope laying for work to get paid for it.

I definitely know peeps who fall down that rabbit hole and also somehow manage to burn all their Vaca and SL time but never an hour more than that.

 

I cant speak for small business, it would be illegal for us to pass those costs to the customer.

 

There is a difference between overhead expenses and operating expenses

 

Again, not true. I have worked on rates development in a small business for most of my career. When we had to open up our books for gov and tier 1 contracts, overhead and profit rates were laid out.

It is impossible to run a business without having overhead costs passed along to the customers. That is where layers of middle men, or middle management, vacuum up $$.

 

I think we are getting into accounting semantics. At the end of the day, the revenue from the sale of products has to pay for all expenses. Products must be priced such that they generate enough revenue to cover it all. No matter how you want to describe it, the math still has to work.

 

Overhead is the common term for operating expenses (office space, TP, management, staff, copiers, etc.).

What do you define as overhead?

 

It’s not actually, they are completely different.

This thread is already grossly derailed and this discussion would grow beyond general replies.

 

Sounds good.



BTW, I do see what you are talking about, but we never had to split those hairs and the costs associated with either were never considered problematic. So, we considered them as one item.

 

Nicely done. I suspect you had better luck than I with your router. It was my first big router project, and I learned as I went.

 

Yeah man it went a lot better then I expected. When you did yours did you rough cut out the excess material before going to the router?