Nice work, Michael! I don't know how you have any time to review audio gear considering everything that you've been restoring. Please don't tell me that you have a full-time job as well. If so, my next question will be: How many hours are there in a day in Texas?
Yes - this is all part time for me as I do work a normal job.
I pretty much eat, sleep, breathe hifi audio when I'm awake and asleep.
I don't want to allow audio to become a full time job. In my mind when that happens and then you need to make money from it, the dynamics change to a place I'd rather not go.
Right now I get to review gear (I turn down about 70% of requests), topics, and restore items that I WANT to spend time on. To me I can't think of something less desirable than creating content on something I don't like.
I also just scored an inbound piece from 1898!! This is going to be an entirely new process for me because rather than restoring / refinishing like I have been doing, I need to move into a preservation-only mode as they are SUPER rare.
I studied how the museums clean preserve and protect middle aged armor over the weekend (to deal with the different kinds of metals, woods and dyes) and ordered about $200 in museum-type preservations products to learn how to tackle that.
For instance, the metal I'm going to be dealing with uses a red Japanese ink dye that is totally unique!
This is going to be fun.......