Am I going to Hell?

[The Dude]

BTW, if anyone here goes to hell, I'll be sitting at the bar with SGM (punishment). Please stop in, have a drink, and rescue me.

[Enzo]

Hell? I'll be too busy shaking hands to notice the heat.

[Chuck H]

Well... I'll say this...

Before I started tweaking amps and doing most of my own repairs I was using vintage Marshalls. I wrote "Marshalls" because I needed a brace of them to be sure I had one for a gig at any moment. Old amps break and I was spending some money on repairs occasionally. None of the repairs involved transformers and none were complicated, but always more than sixty five bucks and that was some twenty years ago!!! The shops my amps went to (and I'm frugal enough) usually had a minimum charge of $65 diagnosis applied to the repair if you accepted the estimate and signed the "what if" portion of the proposal (again, twenty years ago). This was in the SF bay area though. So keep it in perspective I suppose. My point is that I would have been happy with a $65 charge walking out with a working amp. So there's that.

I (personally) don't upcharge parts because I'm not a repair technician. I do a few repairs for cheap or free for friends and acquaintances just to be in the game. Since the amps I make are usually custom designs there are the added expenses of prototyping. Like designing the damn thing from scratch, researching and sourcing parts and having a custom faceplate made. Sometimes even a chassis depending on the design. I may have to buy three reverb pans to get one that actually works like should and sounds acceptable (anyone else having this problem!?!) and I may need to try a couple of different speakers, having to buy at least one model "just to try" often as not. I make about five bucks an hour building an amp I certainly don't do it for the money , so parts expense is just presented as receipts (without charging for the extra reverb tanks and speakers I may, or may not use later). So...

If I were doing repairs for a living I most certainly would charge whatever the parts cost me in money AND time. Since electronic repair isn't my business I don't concern myself with that aspect of it ONLY because it's not how I make my living, it's an aspect of how I make my fun.

[big_teee]

But, do you have good intentions?
They say, "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions" !
T

[gbono]

By the way, a similar technique was used successfully by HP Lovecraft, who never clearly describes his monsters, but lets you imagine them.
Good trick

so true - my favorite Lovecraft: Herbert West — Reanimator

[Enzo]

That works in humor too. The best punch lines are the ones that bloom in the audience's head rather than get spelled out.