A dozen or so...

One of the lessons from my dad that I'll never forget but, apparently, never listen to was "10-15 is the max". That was his sweet spot for making a product. Once he got to around a dozen or so, he'd get bored with the design. From a business perspective, this is madness. You gotta milk that design for all it's worth. Kidding. Sort of. I always like to the limit the amount of a design but it's just not reasonable to run a business with only a dozen or so of each design...is what I believed anyway. Ten years ago, I could easily make 50-100 of each design and still be fine but what I didn't have under my belt was 50 years of manually machining hundreds of the same part. I still don't have 50 years of it but now I have a decade of it and, frankly, I burned myself out. Waaaaa. Talk about spoiled. I can't imagine the folks that are/were making thousands of the same thing for a tiny fraction of the pay. Honestly, that's what goes through my mind when I'm standing at a lathe making a production piece for hours and hours..."be grateful for this, be grateful for this", and don't get me wrong, I'm truly grateful, BUT, I'm going to shift gears in 2024 and finally start listening to pops. Anything I make by hand will either be one of a kind or limited to a dozen or so. I have no idea if this will cause irritation to folks. I see people online getting angry with makers because their product sells too quickly. Good problem to have but that's the last thing I want so let's just see how this experiment goes.