How To Try a New Hobby Without Spending All of Your Money

So you want to try out that new cool looking hobby, do you? You can picture yourself mastering whatever it is, as people swoon around you and marvel at your incredible skill and craftmanship. You’ve read blogs on how to brew beer and now you want to impress your friends and beguile an ever-increasing list of potential sexual partners.

Of course, you have never tried this thing before, but you’ve tirelessly devoured Youtube videos, and they make it look pretty simple. So you go out and pick up all of the equipment you need to get started thanks to the HELOC you opened last year, and you bring it home to your garage with dreams of incredible success swirling around in your head.

Let’s stick with the beer analogy for now, even though the subtitle would disagree with that.

By the time you’re brewing up your third batch, you are starting to realize that maybe you’d rather just go out and buy a six-pack and spend your Saturday playing disc golf with your friends instead of slogging through another clogged mash tun.

Whatever do you mean? Surely the amazing and overly talented Captain DIY would never have floundered his way through something like that without incurring widepspread recognition and riches!

Well kids, as they say, you should never meet your heroes, and in this case (I’m going under the assumption that I am your hero, naturally) there may be some truth to that. I have been known to enthusiastically start up some cockamamie activity with full and vigorous gusto only to abandon said activity with equal gusto shortly thereafter.

Hey, that’s the subtitle! That’s like a fourth wall break or something, right? Innovation is fun, especially when you steal it from someone else! (I watched Deadpool the other day, which I’m pretty sure is the king of fourth-wall breaks)

I recently dove into another ridiculous hobby, much to the thinly-veiled annoyance of the ever-suffering Mrs. DIY. Not really, she actually thinks it’s pretty cool, but it’s fun to picture her rolling her eyes at yet another whackado scheme I’ve come up with so I can pretend we live in a sitcom.

This hobby, as you may have guessed, is blacksmithing, and it is super fun. Basically, you heat up metal until it is glowing hot, then you smash it with a hammer until it is a different shape. Keep doing that for a while, and eventually you will have a piece of metal that looks like it has been hit with a hammer a bunch of times. Fun!

The thing about blacksmithing, and I suspect there aren’t many hobby-type activities that don’t fall under this umbrella, is that you can very easily spend a butt-ton of money on equipment when you are getting started. I mean, a good anvil will set you back a solid $700, plus there’s flat hammers and ball-peen hammers and cross-peen hammers and so on and so forth, not to mention the forge. For those of you who aren’t in the know, the forge is where you heat the metal up to beating temperature, and real blacksmith shops have these huge monolithic fire-breathing beasts that command the central attention of the space. Not something to stuff into a one-car garage.

Then one day I came across a video in which the guy was going over how to make a blacksmith setup for little to no money, and the way he presented it made it seem incredibly accessible. I’ll link the video, but the base message of it is this: all you really need is a place for a fire, a way to force air into that fire, a hammer, and a flat piece of metal to pound on.

I won’t go too crazy explaining my setup and how I did it and so forth because this article is pretty long-winded already, but suffice it to say I was able to make a pretty cool little rebar knife, and I spent roughly $30 on materials!

No way! This ideology can be applied to anything that you are thinking about getting into!

The idea is simple: find the most cost-effective bare-bones way you can find to try whatever it is you want to try, and use that setup for a while. If you find that you still enjoy the process, maybe you could think about slowly adding in some more “proper” equipment as needed, but you still have the luxury of time to help you find the best deals on said equipment.

For example, I know that I would benefit from having a ball-peen hammer in my tool kit. I don’t necessarily need one right now, mostly because I’m not doing anything complex enough to require it yet, but at some point that would be great to have. So, I’m starting to keep my eye on Craigslist and other such places so that when one comes up for a decent price, I’ll be ready.

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