Dennis, JPG,
Yes, you are right and we have discussed this before on the forum as well. I did check the search terms for both "maker" and "CNC", with the first being a nebulous term. Both essentially flat over the entire timeframe that Google has tracked this. For me, I see it differently than you do. When I look at woodworking, there are both the pros and the amateurs (don't like this word, but it fits). The pros being the ones doing it for a living and this could be in a large commercial space or in a garage or home shop but at scale with good revenue coming in. Now "pro" here doesn't necessarily mean highly skilled.

Some "amateurs" who do it at home as a hobby, can be MORE skilled than those who do it in a professional setting. No value judgement here, but just trying to define the dataset. Example: Someone may profit by making & selling river tables, so they are in the "pro" category, but yet can't make a M&T joint to save their life, hence they are a less skilled woodworker than many "amateurs". IMHO, Shopsmith has sold
predominantly to the home hobbyist woodworker, i.e. the amateur, NOT the pro. So, really my question is whether over the last 70 years that home hobbyist (amateur) woodworker has been in decline in numbers or not and this is an even more difficult metric to get at. In my opinion, maker is a trend that has come and gone. I mean there have been DIY people for decades that do their own welding, their own metal cutting, their own wrenching, their own screen printing, their own woodworking, their own X, their own Y, their own Z. Then all of a sudden someone decided to coin a marketing buzz word and leveraged it with social media and influencers to drive sales. So, pardon me, but I call BS on all of the maker insanity.

Now, CNC's are interesting...they have attempted to invade the home woodworking shop and have made some inroads, but this gets back to the pro versus amateur discussion for me. I would argue that CNC's whether they cost tens of thousands of $ and reside in a commercial space or cost $5k and reside in a home workshop are vast majority being utilized by pros who are selling product for profit. There are only a handful of people, in my opinion, buying CNC's to play with in a home hobbyist shop...outliers. The reason I am framing this problem in this manner, is we started talking about Shopsmith and its TAM (total available market) and could it go up 25X in this reality in this universe??? So, I posit that Shopsmith is predominantly an amateur (hobbyist) machine, though there are a few who use them for pro work. Many of these pros are forum members here who post regularly and in my opinion are highly skilled as well and I enjoy their posts when they have time to break away from production and share with us hobbyists here.

Still, in total numbers, I believe those doing "pro" work and making money with their Shopsmiths are few in number compared to the total number of Shopsmith owners out there who are hobbyists. So, for me comparing CNC operators/makers to Shopsmith owners is like comparing apples and oranges because they are two totally different markets. For me they are the rest of the market under the umbrella term "woodworking" since if you are turning (pun) out a wood product at the end of the day (for profit or enjoyment in the home) then you are by my definition a woodworker. Now, if you want to discuss how Shopsmith may/may not be able to capture more TAM by going after the pros then I would be happy to discuss this and would like to know what changes Shopsmith intends to make in this regard because I still don't see it as a "pro" machine. I still believe its value, its build quality, its feature set are geared towards the home hobbyist woodworker as it was marketed to 70 years ago. However, if they are going to re-engineer the machine to capture the "pro" woodworker then that could allow them to capture more TAM and attempt to approach 25X, though that is still a dream in my analysis, but hey what do I know?
