How Music Projects Teach Me About Plumbing Estimating

Youve got your head wrapped around it. In the cheap seats of the pro recording world we have this term "cable poor." You go cable poor when you get a great deal on something like a console, deck or expanded interface but fail to budget for the cabling, which in pro gear might need to be custom... even if you're handy you still need yards of quality cable and the correct connectors for everything that will be interfaced... in vintage stuff you could be sourcing Elcos and Edacs in addition to XLR, TRS and db25s. Even if someone gave me a nice old console free I would hesitate to take it unless I had storage space for it because I might not have the cash flow to interface it right away and I dont want to go in debt for cabling. How hard will it be to a amortize the cost with the interest running?

The thing about costing out a recording space that you missed though is maintenance. If you can diy you still need parts on hand. Once a piece is out of warranty the maintenance costs shoot up beyond shipping to and from the manufacturer... if you like old stuff, and I do, repairs are up to you. I've got a pile of projects dtackedon top of my space echo... I put them off due to time at first but now that I have time I don't want to invest in the repairs (I'm short some oddball part for every piece in the repair stack, there's these tiny shaft syfam pots that I just hate, hard to source and pricey despite being a standard value and taper).

...I label ALL of my cables on both ends and the middle. They are spaced equally apart and the length is custom so there is no excess. I used to do hardwire install on networks.

THIS is the way. Bonus points if you left the client with color-coded as-built drawings.