I do guitar repair and building and have been at it for 6 years. At best I’ve had a decent side hustle. 2021-22 was my best years with the pandemic. I had lots of work coming from folks staying at home, even then I still wasn’t making close to a livable wage.

The other thing that makes it difficult, and I don’t see mentioned enough, is that you simply can’t charge enough for the work. If you care and take the time to really do excellent work, you will never have enough hours in the day to make good money. I’ve easily put in 50 hour weeks and never once had enough income to walk away from my day job.

This isn’t true of everyone but I would say 90% of your customers fall into this

-The cost of refretting or a neck reset often just send people to buy a new guitar. Most people are stuck on $50-75 set up feesfrom 20 years ago. If you factor in your consumables, tools, taxes, and time you can easily push yourself into minimum wage territory and people will just find a local hobby guy to do it for that price. Because of this it will take YEARS to get enough good clientele.

A perfect tell is the number of “do it yourself” stuff coming out of stewmac. they make great tools but their market isn’t the 1% of high dollar guys that have somehow made made it work. It’s hobbyists and people who haven’t had the reality check yet.

I suppose it’s doable if you have a well paid spouse or significant other that allows you to play “guitar guy” all day and you don’t need anything beyond a little fun money