How many weird 3D printed trinkets and thingers would I make before I got bored of it? I wondered if a small side-project would be print small parts of bikes and cameras. Etsy seems to be have a good amount of sellers making things like hot-shoe covers for cameras, mounts for bike lights, tiny shelves for displaying records.
There is a reason this idea of a hobby was never realised.
Maybe it's because I grew up in a home that often had motorcycle parts in the bath and more assembled bikes in the garage than anyone should own, but if I didn't live in a small borrowed flat and had a useable garage I can see myself having a project car or bike or both.
Maybe we should all be thankful that this limitation is keeping me from putting another stupid modified car on the road. What would it be? I'm not a Miata/MX5 kind of guy, I'll never have enough cash to restore a 1970s Porsche 911, and a good Japanese import would probably be the biggest money pit of all.
Let's settle on a BMW R that is somewhere between faithfully restored and cafe racer abomination.
As an endlessly renewable resource, wood can be used to make pretty much anything that doesn't involve fire or water.
I quite like the idea of working a single piece of into something useful or useless and functional or decorative. I don't really own anything that I would consider irreplaceable except for a 1950s Danish teak desk. It's beautifully made and ironically I got it for a very low price because someone who didn't know what they were doing took a belt sander to it.
The best I could hope for would be to gradually move along the skill-spectrum from belt-sander to precision hand tools. From ruiner to creator.
OK, Welding. Not really a hobby, but an idea for my post-software engineering life. As usual, not making things easy for myself.
I really like the idea of building steel or titanium bike frames. Materials that are hard to work with and becoming less and less popular as high end road bikes become more and more complex is a classic example of me making things more complex than they need to be.
The more likely reality is asking a farmer if they need a website after I have welded a gate back together.
Hobby three: Bass guitar.
It's that gap between music appreciation and musical ability. I would love to be able to play Chicken Grease while not being Pino Palladino. The fact that I could probably still play ?uestlove's part on that track to a passable standard has fooled me into thinking I could get that syncopation on the bass just right.
Another hobby idea that I haven't even attempted: Pen plotting.
I'd like to use code to generate some one off geometric designs, then feed them to the pen plotter to draw them. One of the things I struggle with with code-as-creativity is that it's not tactile. Even the most elaborate canvas-based generative art still only exists as magnetism in a bunker owned by Jeff Bezos. This gets me to a physical object while bypassing my lack of drawing skills.
Let's do a quick week on hobby ideas that I never quite realised.
In the early 2010s I lived in Hackney Wick and would take an early overground train each morning to get to soho for work. most mornings a long and heavy freight train would roll through and I started to record it. Just with my phone, but it sounded good. This extended to recording buskers and trains entering tube stations.
I occasionally listen back to them, and this led me to buy a small field recorder a couple of years ago with the intention of recording each city I visit.
The recordings I got were not good, mostly because of misunderstanding the equipment and falling foul of the sensitivity and no-harness sound which is very different to a phone.
I'd like to come back to this, and share the recordings. It's very noticeable how different cities sound. In the fugitive it takes them a stupid about of time to recognise the sound of Chicago from a phone call, as if the L doesn't sound like nothing else.