Hello everyone,
First, the TLDR version - My experience with composites consists mainly of what I’ve read in car & science magazines, car forums, & seen on TV racing coverage via the mainstream avenues. I’m here trying to determine what kind of job opportunities there are in the field so I know what to look for in my area, or what opportunity there is for entrepreneurs, & go from there.
The full version- I was recently laid off from an IT Telecom position with a company my wife & I had been with for roughly 4 years. The company went under with all the recent events & the bulk of it’s assets were purchased by another company. My wife continued on with the new company (HR) but they did not bring me on since they wanted someone local (home office in Seattle, we have both worked from home in FL for 2+ years). By background has consisted mostly of computer (custom build & sales) & telecom (wireless w/ some wired) with automotive mostly as a hobby. Now that I find myself laid off with a 12% unemployment rate here & no open jobs in the same line of work I’ve been doing for 4+ yrs in a 100 mile radius, I’m considering changing careers and/or some school/training.
IT has been my grind for over 10 years now, but cars (& at one time planes, nearly went military to fly) are where my heart is. I considered getting my pilots license, but some pilot friends of mine quickly talked me out of that due to the cost and time involved and the horrible pay entry Pilots seem to be getting these days. I considered going to school full time to go down the path of A&P Mechanic, but after looking at the time in school vs. the average income of graduates & available jobs in the immediate area I was a lot less excited about the prospect as well. Automotive mechanic was even worse, and I had no burning desire to cut my teeth as a dealership shop peon.
In a perfect world I would love to find a way to work for myself in the automotive field manufacturing parts. I’ve spent a lot of time with many various vehicles wishing people would produce a part that either wasn’t available for a particular platform, or I didn’t like what the other companies made & had my own ideas for a better solution but didn’t have the tools to do so. Unfortunately my move from OR to FL has gone the wrong direction for tooling, I nearly gave away my entire shop trying to fit everything we owned into a single u-haul trailer when we moved down here. I sold things like a new Lincoln mig welder that was never even out of the box for a 100-200 bucks, so you can imagine what the rest of it went for to get rid of it quickly & how much I regret it now.
I’m the kind of guy that prefers to know how to do everything from start to finish, keep it all in house, and composites are certainly where I have the least experience. I spent a few years in Engineering class in HS as a TA, I excelled at fabrication, welding, engineering, & design enough to help my peers with it, but aside from the occasional around home & garage tinkering I’m 13 years out of practice. I haven’t touched a mill, lathe, CAD, CFD, or CNC for just as long. I really miss actually having to use my brain to solve problems & create vs. having to simply react & repeat.
So hopefully, my digging around here (and maybe some helpful tips from those of you in the industry) will help me decide what to do for the rest of my working life. I hope I can find some education & inspiration hints that lead me to go for it, but it’s also entirely possible I could realize that for whatever reason it’s out of reach & send me packing back to the IT field of purgatory. Composites is not the only part of this equation, but being the part I know the least about it I figured I’d start here.
So hello all, I appreciate any tips you can throw my way, or threads you can point me to that may be pertinent. Otherwise I’ll probably be digging around here for a while, popping in various threads asking really ignorant questions 
Hopefully some day I’ll actually be able to contribute ideas & help others, but that will be a ways off :push:
