For example, I’m sure the average joe doesn’t know just how expensive calligraphy pens can be, or how deep the rabbit hole goes on video game speedruns.
Probably more well known but with the whole ‘live edge’ fad from a couple years ago now, some people don’t realize you can spend upwards of 20-30k on a single piece of some types of raw lumber.
I feel like woodworking is one of those traditional “this hobby is expensive” things, but I was shocked by just how hard it is to do some things (like hollow out a bowl-shaped divot in a piece of wood) without the proper tools. And the proper tool is sometimes a single hook knife that’s $89 dollars.
You can get 8 foot of pine from any hardware store for $10, but if you want to do anything other than cross cut that pine to different lengths, you’re going to need to drop some cash.
Of course, the skill ceiling for woodworking is enormous.
Skydiver here.
It’s not just money, it’s not just skill that makes you a successful jumper.
It’s a certain type of attitude and the ability to think when you’ve aimed yourself at a planet. Not everyone can do it. To be blunt, there is a large part of the population that shouldn’t do it, because they have terrible decision making ability.
As far as money, I went through the student program in the mid 90’s and it cost me about $1200, if I recall correctly. My first rig, used, was $4000. My second rig, new, was just over $8000. I have 4500 jumps most of which I paid ~ $20 each for. I don’t want to do that math.
The best decision I can think of to make when someone asks me if I would like to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and plumet toward the ground at high speeds would be to say “No thanks.”
Former skydiver here. The best response I ever heard to the “why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane” question was, “you should see the planes we jump out of.”
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3D printing! You can start out cheap but you can get STUPID expensive, and it’s the biggest most meandering rabbit hole I know of
3D printing really isn’t expensive, especially since you can create a lot of stuff for cents. I’m considering a new extruder for my Ender 3 (Looking at the LDO orbiter v2) and that’s €70, which sounds expensive for the printer, but compared to any other hobby that’s peanuts
Yeah, €70 is not much for an upgrade for a hobby. That’s the price of a mid-range chain for a mountain bike and chains are not upgrades, they’re consumables, which you buy at least once a year, lol.
3D printing can be expensive, but I disagree that it is stupid expensive.
Model trains. Sure, you can have a lot of fun with a 100 dollar toy train, but those brass engines are very shiny and very expensive.
Keyboards are generally known about, but the ergo part of it is a rabbit hole within the rabbit hole. Some people literally design, 3D print, wire up, solder and program one-off keyboards because they don’t like the ones made by other people.
Maybe not as expensive as the others, but crochet/knitting/sewing all start off fairly cheap, and then the next thing you know you’re offering to service old men behind a Joann’s fabric because you need this particular fabric and you need an entire bolt of it, and it’s the one fabric in the entire fucking store that isn’t on their amazing buy one get 73 free sale for the week.
Playing music has basically no skill ceiling.
I am still amazed about how much money you can spend on making coffee at home. 300€ for a manual grinder - “that’s the cheao chinese stuff” wtf
Magic: the gathering.
There’s several different styles of play known as “formats”.
The Cheapest being “Standard”. Which is the latest 3-5 sets released. The deck of 75 card deck can cost upwards of £500.
Then the most popular format, modern, which is the last 20ish years of release. The average deck there can be upwards of £1,500.
Then there’s legacy and vintage where decks are in the high 4 figures and some even in the 5 figures.
I’ll do the reverse - I think most people would expect homebrewing beer to be quite hard to get started with, but for $50 you can get everything you need to start making a really quite good beer, and save money at the same time (homebrewed beer is usually much cheaper than store bought)
If you want to get started search for “brew in a bag” and buy a kit beer mix. You’ll need a handful of equipment like a brew bag and fermenter, but that stuff is really cheap.
Then you can indeed go down a massive rabbit hole of refinements, but it just amazed me that the first beer you make will already be a good one.
Rock climbing. To start out you basically just need $150 worth of shoes and some $5 chalk. Trad climbing or big wall climbing can be 5 figures and a dozen years worth of experience. And the skill ceiling is probably obvious, but it’s become an Olympic sport for a reason.
Bouldering here in the Netherlands can start pretty easily:
- € 10-15 entry
- € 5 to rent shoes, although you can bring any clean sport shoes yourself
And that’s it!
You can look into buying shoes and memberships if you’re really into it, but even then € 150 for shoes and € 40-60 a month for a membership is cheaper than my idea of an expensive hobby, like Magic the Gathering or PC building and gaming.
Gymnastics. The skill part is obvious but monetarily its more than i expected. I thought it would be like going to a regular gym but its usually much more expensive to use the gyms and thats if you can find a time slot where adult males can train.
Modular synths, eurorack is where you find the most accessible modules than the other formats. Sometimes you go and spend 600€ in a module without batting an eye.
Also you have to count the case, patch cables, etc.
It gets expensive quickly if you can’t fight the GAS (gear acquisition syndrome)
Also it is a musical instrument so you need to practice many hours to play it affectively.
It is really cool, I do enjoy myself playing with my modular, but would love to have more time to spend with it.
From what I’ve seen, modulars tend to attract people that love to tinker but aren’t necessarily very musical. They spend 30k and years on their setup but when they actually play something it’s just space soup. There are exceptions of course, some respected producers do use them, but that’s just my casual observation.
Absolutely. I love audio design, synthesis and making music, but I have rarely released anything. It took a long time for me to realize and accept that I do this for my own entertainment and not to be a successful musician. Its just a hobby.
And there’s nothing wrong with that! Music has also always remained something I did for fun, I have a different creative field as my day job and I don’t want to do the same with music nu-hu.
Hobby CNC
You can get a little table top router and some simple software for a couple hundred bucks. You can go deep into it. Building a custom machine, writing your own post processor, dialing in you CNC to insane levels of accuracy and precision, adding a 4th axis, engineering parts and projects, it goes on. It basically combines robotics, design engineering, and manufacturing engineering all in one hobby.
4th axis? X, Y, & Z with rotation along one of the axis?
Or are you milling time cubes?
5D milling is where it’s at. No, it’s not a joke.
Mountain biking.
Why would you not expect that to have a high ceiling either monetarily or in sheer skill? I mean bikes are expensive, and it’s a sport practiced on a professional level.
Because you can get a basic bike for like a couple of hundred quid and commute for years. It’s just a basic transport type. Yet it grew into quite an absurd, dangerous and expensive hobby.
The bike is one thing, but you also need a mountain.
That too.
