I have an interest in Cars and have always been a gearhead before I have been a musician. One of the things I do to fund my music making is I run a website that sells car parts and car apparel.
Heres some of the designs:
What side projects do you guys have that fund your music habit?
Mostly sucking corporate cock takes care of all that.
Well, I guess I do have an Amazon affiliate site that brings in about a grand a year. Not much, but it’s completely passive, as I haven’t touched it in several years. So that part is kind of cool. Also, it’s kind of fun to actually go and look at Amazon reports for the shit that people buy. A lot of completely unrelated (to my site) random crap, but since my cookie lives for 24 hours, anything they buy on Amazon in that time period, I get a cut.
I’ve been selling off about half my old Lego collection for the past six months or so. I needed the space and I didn’t want to maintain them all anymore. I haven’t even touched that money yet, so it should be a great boon when I’m done and I finally take that in.
I’ve been doing mastering off and on for people around the forums quietly, and a few have told me that I should be more active about that, so I put a page up on fiverr. I’ve never gotten tons of gigs mastering, but it’s an extra few dollars here and there that can cover some of the odds and ends I don’t think about, like cables or stands.
Once I’m done shifting my Legos, I want to pick up something else. My brother and I have pretty magnetic personalities together, so we’ve talked about doing some sort of game-streaming youtube channel for awhile. We bought the equipment and did a weekend’s worth of recording once, but there were some technical issues to work out and we both keep pretty busy as it is. I’m hoping to give that a go again since we’ve been able to make time to work together on selling stuff, maybe once we’re done we’ll be in the habit of making time to work together.
Yeah. Mostly that.
And that. Classic car restoration and woodworking. Orders of magnitude more expensive. But they also bring in some cash from time to to time, and the music doesn’t.
I need to do more with it, but I was making fan-made shirt designs on RedBubble for video games that absorb my soul. The game in particular, Killing Floor 2, gave me about a grand last year, nothing crazy, but considering the work it took to do the designs, totally worth it.
Lots of things I’ve wanted to pick up as profitable side-hobbies, but for the most part I just haven’t dialed in the exact thing I want to do. I’ve considered getting into the screen-printing and physical design for shirts/patches and stuff, I just don’t have the room in my condo currently.
Nice thread, btw : )
What type of classic cars? I have an 87 Nissan 200sx I just fixed up and drove across the country it was pretty fun. It was sold to me as a blown motor car, but within a week i had it fixed up and running great, only 99xxx miles on it and i drove it from california to illinois and only broke down once because of an electrical issue
If it’s got a carburetor, I’ll probably wrench on it.
But mostly pre-60s. I’ve got a couple of '46-'47 Hudson Commodores, a '58 Plymouth Fury that needs to go down to the frame for blasting, and a rough looking '57 Bel Air waiting in the wings that I’ll have to do some serious English wheeling on.
Very nice, my parents have "68 and "70 half ton chevies that I basically try to keep from falling apart. Having them all fixed up is kind of a pipe dream as the last 10 years has just been me trying to convince them (successfully ) to not sell them every few months so that I can have them and work on them when I have space and money. That day feels no closer now than it was years ago, but I know if they sell them I’ll probably not be able to afford to get back into the classic game for a long time. It’s kind of sad TBH because they used to buy and restore all sorts of classic chevies and did some great work. Made enough money doing it to put the down payment on our house, but then they stopped and just kept those last two trucks.
That said, my mom’s cab has been painted recently and had a new windshield in to fight rust and I’ve given them both internally locking hoods so that the batteries don’t get stolen anymore. My dad’s interior is done and the paint on his isn’t bad, but he needs a new powertrain and rear end. Mom has a solid powertrain, but we need to take her doors apart and do all the internal seals and mechanics there. Plus the rest of the body needs paint and the interior is trashed and the engine bay (on both) could use a thorough cleaning. Oh, and both of them are still on drum brakes, I’d really like to see discs on at least the front. This weekend, we need to fight a bit of rust on one of dad’s doors, we had a lot of rain the past few weeks and I get out there and try to keep the door seals dry, but it’s an uphill battle when no one else seems to care.
If all else fails, I’d like to build a car and go up pike’s peak one day. I looked at the regulations and think I could get a junked engine tuned up and have a metal shop do a chassis to spec for me for a few 10s of thousands of dollars (what with all the electronics and safety equipment, maybe a compound turbo setup, which is gonna need an actual performance computer to tune right). Carbon fiber body and floorplane might be out of the question, but I imagine fiberglass would be close enough and run a lot less expensive.
Pikes Peak style racing is the dream, I’m more into the Drifting and Street racing aspects of car culture, but I would love to do an uphill battle some day! My current car needs a little rust repair, nothing too crazy, just surface rust, but after that I’m doing a tube frame front end, and putting a bumper on the front and rear from the next model up car. I recently bought 2 new engines from a newer model Nissan, and the supplies needed to do the swap, just gotta wait for the snow to go away so i can do it. I also do a lot of electrical work on cars (I’m an electrician for my day job) so i make custom harnesses, switch panels, etc.
