Cost of a mill is not too bad. Its the collets, bits and other attachments that kill ya.
I am a mechanical engineer but electronics was an avocation. Fixed TVs for fun and would sell them at garage sales.
And built a few inverted sinwave sync suppressed converters to unscramble early pay TV.
Also wrote a communications program to hack into the local real estate MLS system in the days of 300 baud modems. I don't think hack was a term even used in those days.
Fun times. ;o)
Yes, indeed.
Many of my Ham friends worked at the Labs or Military bases. Excellent physicists, engineers and electronic techs. The community did some really great home brew projects. I got in on the board fabrication. Was set up to screen print and etch the boards. Did not have the ability to plate through the holes. But we worked around that.
I saw a lot of very interesting electronic sites. Those were really interesting times.
I hold an Amateur Extra and a commercial radio license. But I never actually made a living doing that. I was in the wholesale distribution business for 35 years.
Am still pretty current of methods. Nobody fixes anything anymore and certainly nobody actually builds anything electronic now. But I did.
Built my first PC in 1982 from components that had problems. We fixed them and I still have one of them in my junk room. I suspect it would still function after all those years. I built the power supplies very well. Big failure issues were electrolytic capacitors. Not as many in computers as there were in RF equipment.