In my last update I wrote about getting started in Tech 2 manufacturing, using the alt that I had painstakingly trained up.
It has been a few months now and I'm still working on manufacturing. I'm sure I took some time off between the last post and now, but right now I'm still selling items from one of my latest batches. I'm making pretty good profits. IPH tells me I'm often getting 50% returns, which whittle down with competition for the items in my local market. Nonetheless, it has been profitable even though the actual ISK per hour might be low.
I have found some items that sell pretty well and have been manufacturing those. I also dipped my toes into T2 ship production. Building T2 ships is just like building anything else, but it takes much longer to invent and my skills for ships are lower than my other skills, so I fail more often. Ships in my market move slower than other things too, and it doesn't help that I get undercut on slow moving items. Nonetheless, it has been fun building ships and I have a much healthier respect for people who build the larger ships.
I briefly explored building the new(ish) T3 destroyers. However, you need a POS to build them and based on what I can see you can easily lose ISK building them, especially when you factor in the fuel costs and opportunity cost of building something else. I'll still keep my eye on that, though.
Speaking of POSes, I still build out of a station. Right now I don't think I'm producing enough to take advantage of the bonuses of using a POS, but I can certainly see how producing things 25% faster would be beneficial. Assuming I could sell what I was making and continuously run the lines, I'm sure the fuel costs would wash out. However, I have heard that you need to play material tetris and I have zero interest in doing that. Building out of a station with a single hangar is easy when all you need to do is load up the T2 BPC and click build.
Right now my biggest hurdle is keeping my lines going. I tend to build everything I planned to build, sell everything that I built, then start researching what to build next/ gathering the materials. What I should be doing is keeping the lines going, because downtime in manufacturing is wasted time and wasted ISK.
It is nice seeing the wallet increasing, though. Hopefully it keeps up and I don't make any major blunders.
