BadBob

I don't pay much attention to the whiners in my Etsy group, mostly because they can't give you the numbers, so they don't know anything. I only go there to see if there is anything new going on. I know social media is a moving target and that I need to keep up with the new social media as they come along. I also need new and different things in my shop. I watch several shops that have lots of sales. All of them have lots of items for sale. I came up with the number 200 as all of them have 200 or more listings with lots of choices. Etsy is always touting following the trends. I don't do that because it would have me making things that I don't want to build on the outside chance that someone might buy it. If I must follow trends to get sales, I might quit. However, I would like to make a profit.

I love Evapo-Rust. It works great, especilly for small parts. What I like best is that I can keep using it until it stops working, and when I'm finished I can pour it on my lawn as an iron supplement. There are no chemical burns or hazardous waste to dispose of. You can probably get molasses in 55 Gallon drums. I seent rust removed with all sorts of things. Potatoes and water being the strangest. It smells terrible. Lye solution will remove rust and seems to work better if you add a piece of zinc. I used to hunt civil war relics and used this method to clean heavy rust off of cast iron. It takes a long time, but it works.

The lazy susan is on my todo list. TicToc is also on my list. I would like to do more with video, but right now there just isn't enough time. I have the equipment already. I do ramp races with my grandson using a Bluetrack so far I haven't got a good video. Some of the cars we have tried are so fast that all you get is flash. The slide shows are experiments. I do get views from them but not many. A surprising number of my toys are purchased by adults for adults. I had one customer who called them art and bought for cars to decorate her home. At least one person used a car for cake decoration. My sales and views are up over last year and still climbing while other sellers I see are complaining about a drop in sales. So something is working. I appreciate your comments and advise very much.

What I am doing now seems to be working for me. Even now my sales are slowly increasing. I call it promotion but what I am doing is sharing photos of my work with a description, some hashtags, and links to my shop. When I create something new I upload all the photos everywhere I can. 70-80% of my listing views come from these posts. I know from past experience that if I don't get the photos out there the listing will get very few views and will not sell. I've studied other people's shops with similar items who have a lot of sales and one thing is consistent. They all have hundreds of listings. I'm working on that. It's a weird game. Last year my best seller was a Christmas tree cutout. This came directly from a request from a Facebook post I made. She bought eight each; jack-o-lanterns, turkeys, and Christmas trees. I always make extras so I created listings for them. The Christmas trees kept selling.

I have a few videos, but they are just slide shows. https://www.youtube.com/user/51BadBob/videos I don't like using apps to post. Automated ones don't get the keywords right and usually don't create the description I want. For SEO purposes I would like to have different descriptions everywhere. For me, this is very difficult but I try. Everywhere I post has different requirements for descriptions sizes, the number of photos, and hashtags. Has tags are not the same across the board Tumbler, for example, allow spaces in the tags and will suggest poplar tags to use while Pinterest doesn't care and Twitter posts are so small that you really have to work hard at it to squeeze in something relevant. I don't like using my phone for anything. I have been using computers since well before the IBM PC existed. Using an app on my phone feels like I'm working with one arm behind my back and wearing an eyepatch. As far as promotion goes I only use it for things that I can't do on my desktop. Posting to Instagram and Etsy shop updates are examples that come to mind. These only allow posting from a phone or tablet. There are workarounds for Instagram but they tend to get broken easily by upgrades. Currently, I am posting to seven social media sites and planning to add a couple of more if I can manage it.

I'm on everything that will let me post photos for free. Pintrest is where I get the most from. It takes me about four hours to promote a listing on social media. Posting photos, writing descriptions and adding tags. Every time I promote a listing like this I get a little boost.

Facebook contacted me awhile back about selling on Facebook but I could not figure out how to do it. I'm slightly interested since I already have a Facebook business page. If it would let me just add a buy now button to a post. That might be something I would go for.

I cut a lot of 1.5-inch stock, mostly pine, poplar, and oak, with a bit of mystery wood from time to time. I use a #5 skip tooth most of the time. Slow is the name of the game. It took me a while to get this under control and only put enough pressure on the blade to keep it in contact with the wood and let the blade cut and clear out the sawdust. When I come to a corner, I stop for a second or two before making the turn to let the blade catch up.

I like the wooden pegs better than the metal hooks, but it will depend on what your customers want. I have made and used a lot of pegs over the years. They need to fit snugly in the holes or the glue joint will fail. If they go all the way through adding a wedge to the back of the peg will help keep them in place. I would not consider turning them myself unless I needed something special. They are cheap in quantity and I know from my past experience the I would have a pile of different size pegs to deal with.

Beautiful and each is unique. I had not considered mixing them up like that. Thanks.

I have both laser and inkjet. I rarely use the inkjet printer. it's slow and it sits a long time there always seems to be an issue with the ink cartridges. It has no network connection. The laser is color, prints faster, has wired and wireless network connections, and costs under $200. Inkjets print better photos, but a few years ago I did the math and it was cheaper per photo to have the photo printed at CVS. Up load, wait for an email, and pick it up when the wife does her milk run. I factored in the cost of ink, photo paper, and the fact that some times I need to print the photo more than once because of operator errors, printer errors, ink cartridges, and the cost of the printer. I don't know why I still keep the inkjet.

That may be the ultimate solution for me. I can mill my wood, but I don't have a local source.

I can't buy much of anything locally. Certainly not rough lumber. The nearest place I can get hardwoods other than the big box stores is 125 miles away. I have never seen 1-1/2-inch lumber in Lowe's or Home depot, perhaps because I wasn't looking for it.

I shrink wrap puzzles, or if they are simple enough, use stretch wrap and wrap them tightly. I cut heavy box pieces to fit (two-layer corrugated paper) and wrap an tape it tight. Next, the whole thing goes into a bubble padded envelope. To date, I have never had one damaged. These get shipped first class 99% of the time with no insurance. It's cheaper for me to send them another puzzle if it gets damaged. If I were shipping something more substantial and more expensive, I would add more layers and a box made to fit. I feel it is essential to make sure nothing moves around. I tape everything in place, including the bubble wrap. The only time I buy the insurance is for international shipping. I let my customers choose the shipping that they want to use. They rarely choose priority shipping. I have packages coming in all the time, and I save a lot of packing material to reuse. Boxes under 12-inches long and all of the padded envelopes, air pillows, and bubble wrap. I cut the sides off the padded envelopes and roll my toys in it and tape it tightly. I had one of my packages get dropped and run over without breaking the contents. I wish I had enough sales that I needed to buy my packing materials.

I tried two sites for a while. I could not manage it. I was working full time at the time, and I could not keep up with one and a full-time job. I retired from that job thinking that I was going to run my shop full time. That didn't work out as I planned. I have my grandson now about 4 days a week with homeschooling and all the other things I have to do the todo list keeps getting longer and I'm busier than ever. While I'm writing this my grandson has been in here three times showing me things. Right now I'm spending a lot of time promoting my shop. my sales keep slowly climbing. Even now while others seem to have decreasing sales mine are increasing.

For those who make the little 3d bird house ornaments. Do you make your own stock or purchase something like turning blanks? I'm cutting up 2x4s and gluing up cutoffs now but I would like to do this faster and use something other than pine 2x4s.

I make mostly toys. I resaw when I need to. I have a Shopsmith bandsaw, and it does an excellent job for me. Good blades and guides combined with and a properly aligned saw are key to getting a good resaw. I never use my resaw blade to cut curves. Once you twist the blade it will never track straight. I learned about this from paperwork included with my Wolf saw blades. Lately, I have been resawing parts after I cut them out. It the parts are very small I can resaw them on the scroll saw. I figured out how to do this after I cut a large number of parts for wood that was 1/4-inch to thick for my project. it worked like a charm.

This is a bit of a rant. I could write a book. Feel free to ask questions. I have an Etsy shop and don't sell anywhere else. The shop setup is easy to do, but getting sales is work. You first need to learn how to do product photography. You are not going to sell many items if you have bad photos. You will need to learn something about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and use it in your product descriptions. You will spend a lot more time. promoting your shop than anything else. Social media is your friend. I send 80% of my traffic to my site. You need to understand analytics. I'm not particularly good at this. Thre are all sorts of things that don't seem to make sense. For example, the two items in my store that get the most views have never sold. Why do I keep them? They consistently bring visitors to my shop. A know this because of analytics. Understand who your buyers are. Most of my traffic comes from women under 40 that live in or near big cities. Women comprise about 80% of my views and more than 90% of my sales. How do I know this? Analytics. My theory is that men come to my shop and say, "I can make that." and go away. Most (nearly) all of the groups, forums, etc you find online are full of useless advice from people that don't know what they are talking about. As far as I am concerned, if they can't give numbers they don't know what is going on. I'm in the top 20% (Barely) and my sales are started paying for themselves in the last year. Do listen to people like @kmmcrafts who make money selling online.

The air switch is too complicated and expensive. I control my dust collector. With a remote control switch, I purchased at Lowe's in an after Christmas sale several years ago. It controls three outlets. There are a lot of these for sale on amazon.

Mineral oil will not soak in. Why mot just wax the bowl?

Bandsaw blades sizes are not an issue. You can buy any size you need for Timberwolf. I believe they will make them any length you need. I highly recommend them. I have two Shopsmith band saws with different guides on each saw—one for resawing and the other for curves. It took me years to understand that if you buy a high-quality blade for resawing and use it for cutting curves, it will never track straight again. I have never bought what I would call a quality blade from a store. https://www.timberwolfblades.com/

This stuff is useless. I got some by accident once. I could not use it for anything. I wonder what the people who are coming up with rules think happens to all the mineral spirits that are not being sold.

I can cut 1/8-inch thick without a backer. I don't like to do it because cleaning up the fuzzies and tear out on the back of the piece is a pain. For Baltic birch, I need to slow the saw sown a bit until the blade gets dulled a little. I think some of it depends on the wood you are cutting. I make some toys that have some weak parts. I make oak plywood for these parts. It's about 3/16-inch thick and very strong. I can dut this at full saw speed without issues.

I have several Veritas/Lee Valley tools. Planes, marking knives, awls, marking gauges, and saws. Probably some others they are first-class tools. I like the router base because experience with there tools tells me that this one will be first class. I also have some Stew Mac tools because I have guitars. They are not in the same category as Veritas; I have sent things back to them for a refund. When I pay premium prices for a tool, I expect to get a premium tool. I have had Dremel tools for years. They work, but their accessories leave a lot to be desired. I have one in their drill press stand. I will not use it unless I need to drill a hole that is so small I can't mount it in a chuck. The slop in the stand annoys me, but it will drill the holes.

I just read a rather lengthy topic about using a plunge router base for Dremel tools. A rotary tool base that no one mentioned was the Veritas Plunge Base for Rotary Tools. This one has been on my wish list for a while. Not only is it a precision made tool, but it is more versatile. It's a bit pricey, and if all you do is scrollwork, it is probably massive overkill. Video Veritas Plunge Base for Rotary Tools Veritas Plunge Base for Rotary Tools Set