Anything welding

Thats what I want to do. I moved in woth my parents after school and ive been here for the past 7 months. I wanna start buying equipment but my parents have to garage packed full of shit so I have no work space and if I move out on my own I wont have enough money for tools and equipment

 

I don't even remember that honestly. if he wanted a new set we would of done it so he must of been fine with the extra 350 bucks of add ons he got if he only ordered standard sliders and got a that. I'm sure I sent him a hoddie for the mix up.

 

Yeah that was my thought as well. I dont really know who it was so i don't know what when on if there was a mix up but he must of been good or we would of replaced them.

 

Well if you need an employee let me know. I can stick mig and tig

 

I was managing over a million dollars in work at the time, running the cnc table all day, still working on a table, and I had to do 3 different things to track job hours, and log in and out on the computer for every job I worked out. Than after they fired me, they called me wanting information on the jobs. LOL

 

Yeah im not thag valuable to this company. And im sure they werent paying you enough to do all of that. My blood woild boil too if it were me. I hate having to do other peoples work because they dont want to

 

I remember when I pulled the trigger on my business. Scared as HELL for a while, worried about every little thing. We are in a small town, so the risk was high. I started off with my tools I had collected over about 20+ years and $1000 investment from my mom. When I opened door the shop I was in would fit 1 car, and was a little over 500 sq-ft. Now I am in a 9000+ sq foot shop. I only have 2 lifts, but I have 12 bays. We will soon be adding 2 more lifts this summer. Things are progressing well considering over the past 3 years I have invested less than $500 in advertizing, and that includes signage and business cards. I am about to hire my first assistant tech, and we expect to be pulling a profit this year.

 

not to be prying into your personal bussiness but you havent pulled a profit yet? thats the part that scares the hell out of me because if you cant make it then thats all that time and money wasted and thats not the risk i would want to take. but in reality this is the best time of my life to take the risk. My living expenses are as low as they will ever be in my life. (living with my parents and im single)

 

http://www.pirate4x4.com/forum/shop-tools/327637-thoughts-tube-shark-bender-s.html

 

yeah i would pretty much be in your position im only 21. im starting to kick myself a little bit for educational decisions ive made, im kinda wishing i would have had some sort of business education because i feel like thats the hardest part about running a business. and im kinda wishing i would have gone to fabrication school so i learned how to do CAD and all that kind of stuff. Instead i dropped out of a 4 year university and ended up going to welding school.

 

I have 3.5 yrs towards a degree in mechanical engineering and here I am welding shit together for a livin. LOL

 

thats the exact reason why i dropped out of a university, i didnt see myself doing anything with a degree for a college at the time. and i knew a lot of people that went to college and didnt have jobs in there field of study

 

Just seen this.

I've seen it and it looks nice the thing is if you don't have a high ceiling your going to hit it with long bends. I have 22' ceilings and when we roll tube in the roller we come damn close to it.

 

That's where the risk is unless you have start up money it will take time and lots of money. My first two years I dumped everything back into the business netting a loss the first year and only about 11,000 profit the second with just under 200,000 in sales. I spent about 180,000 on machines in a year. I'm now on my forth year in business and net 6 figures profit.

Don't look at it as time wasted if it fails look at what you did and change that the next time around. It's easy to start a business anyone can it's keeping it going is where the work come in. When I was your age I was trying everything a could to start my own business and all failed or made little to no money. I moved on and tried something else.

 

Watching them use the tube shark on extreme offroad on spike. Looks a little more complicated then other ones ive see used

 

What happened to the powerblock? I've noticed that it hasn't been on in a while. What's this PowerNation?

 

I'm watching right now as well I just thought they haven't had new episodes. But I guess they changed all the names!.

 

Yeah its a little goofy and large for what it is. I think the JD2 model 54 would be a better bender for a budget production bender. The RDB 150 if you want to spend a little more for some better specs and are on a budget.

I recommend the RDB 250 for the shop that needs to produce lots of bends. Once you go full electric you will never go back to hydro. My bender is so silent you don't even know it's on unless it's bending.

 

Glad to hear about everyones experience on going out on their own and doing stuff.

I think if i get into school(i don’t really see a reason why i wont/could not) but when i get out i was thinking about starting my own business. may not be building sliders/bumpers ect but maybe i will. also was thinking about more of a specialty type stuff or repairs on stuff. also was talking to my cousin and he was saying if i can take a class and program CNC/cutting tables I could have a chance of making really good money, not just running them but programing them.

 

I welded throughout High School.. Hell, it's basically what kept me in school my senior year. My grades were excellent - just hated having to go to school and listen to other people tell me what to do. Senior year gave a presentation on what I had completed throughout the year, all of the attending teachers were amazed that I pretty much winged the whole thing off the top of my head. The bar was pretty low at that school..

Other than small projects on the boats I've worked on, or emergency repairs at sea - never really did any true fabrication work until a few months ago. Finally plunked down some cash on a good MIG setup, some other various tools.. Built the 4th set of sliders last week, big order for Parking Lot posts and installed 2 sliders in a weekend (Jerry's and Trail Gear)..

Have a railing job coming in for next week before I take off for the Bering Sea. Pretty humorous, this came about as the result of a women telling me I smelled good as she walked by me at the local brewpub.. Hmm.. Then we got talking about welding - next thing you know a diagram was drawn on a bar napkin and I gave her an approximate build price.

I've paid off my welder and half of my plasma cutter after about 3 weeks of work - which has all been done for "friends" thus far. My "friends" really like donating money to me for doing some welding projects for them.

I'm lucky that my present job affords me with the capital to invest in some good equipment, as well as have the time to work in my fledgling shop. It's really nice finding something that I have a passion (and what I would like to think a talent for). It's definitely frustrating; however - I learned early on to invest in quality equipment. It will have a drastic result on the quality of your end result. Case in point an abrasive chop saw.. Compensating for blade deflection, kerf and cleaning up a nasty mess all takes away from my productivity. Spending more time correcting something that's half-ass to get positive results gets old very quickly. Next investment will be a bender/notcher and horizontal band saw.

I can definitely see some profitability in this - although, I'm absolutely going to have to do more than just off-road fabrication. It's just really awesome to have control over my income, and be able to dictate what and where I do things.

Yet, in the same regard - it's really frustrating to be worrying about conducting business the way that I have been. Haven't been advertising on TW or locally for a reason. In my present form I don't feel comfortable doing that. Especially due to the fact that my taxes are already examined under a microscope (commercial fishermen are considered self-employed). I know that if I did put in the time and money to become "legitimate" my business would expand greatly, and I wouldn't have to worry about running my plasma cutter in my driveway, etc. All of my jobs thus far have been through word of mouth, and all of my "friends" have gone away completely satisfied. I've been up-front about everything, and made sure that I haven't promised beyond my current capabilities and delivery time-frames. I see preserving that foundation of trust at the foundation to a good business.

I've definitely seen some pretty incredible success stories on TW, namely Jerry/Bruteforce.. However, I know that the path to a successful operation is so much more than being able to make pretty welds.

Going to take my income from this next fishing season and invest a little more in my shop, and myself - possibly attending some business classes at the local Community College.

Sorry for the long-winded post, just trying to gauge my next step here. I'm anxious to expand, yet - I just don't think it's a wise choice for the immediate future (6 mos.).

I dunno..

Jerry/et al. - at what point did you make the decision to stop worrying about your local neighborhood asshole dropping the dime on your operation and go legit?

- Jake