What can you realistically manufacture in your garage?

I've given this advice elsewhere, and I'll give it here. Go look at the small business initiatives by each branch of the U.S. military; many are now posting lists of open contracts that you can bid on for an incredible array of things.

Browse through those lists and find something you can build.

I really believe the U.S. military is in the midst of a large scale transfer of military spending from traditional large defense contractors to smaller, innovative companies. The Air Force has even opened its own venture capital arm and is actively investing in small businesses. Most, if not every, branch in the military publicly posts contracts for small businesses to bid on.

I think Anduril is a great example of the possibilities in the "new" defense space.

What's interesting is this shift is very reminiscent of military manufacturing in Japan during World War 2; much of the manufacturing was actually done by small businesses of < 30 employees in "garages" scattered around the country instead of very large factories. That was one of the reasons American bombing by Superfortresses was so ineffective at first, and one of the reasons incendiary bombs began being used.

Happy to provide more detail on this. I've been thinking about this space for awhile.

I used to be the education director at a makerspace and now run a 3D printing company selling small plastic parts and teaching entrepreneurs how to start small manufacturing businesses at home.

Few thoughts:

- Focus on your hobbies and other industries you know well. What problems exist? Where can you make things better? Are there problems people mention over and over again?

- CAD modeling is often THE fundamental skill needed for people to bring their ideas to market. You can make CAD models that look almost real using software you can get for free. This allows you to work backwards, first determining if there's a market, and also working out many of the design flaws before making something

If you're just excited to make stuff, and want to get your hands on something, you can do all kinds of things in a tight space.

- 3D printers are small and provide many automated opportunities - Laser cutters are dead simple to set up and use to make real products and are easy to automate. - CNC machines can be had for under 5k and are super powerful - Portable MIG welders have a small footprint and welding tends to be in high demand - Leather working tends to be high perceived value though automation is limited - Soldering and electronics repair requires little space but again, automation is limited

I've got loads of other ideas too but I'm guessing that's good for now. My contact information is in my profile if you'd like to talk more.

I started making jet ski tread mats out of astro turf in my garage last year. Dead simple to cut, margin is super high ($60 for a standard set of three on ~$8 worth of material), and time spent per unit from roll to package is something like 15-20 minutes. It was fun and made about $30k over the summer months but I stopped when I moved back to the west coast.

I could have handled the whole operation in a spare bedroom if I didn't have a garage, and there are plenty of areas where I could have dropped the time required or the cost. I never bought the turf in bulk and I used household scissors to cut from a template so buying a roll and cutting with something more effective may have netted me more. Niche leisure products in spend-y verticals typically do well.

I don't know what you can do in your garage, but in my two car garage I can do:

  * Basic blacksmithing (small furnace & anvil)
  * Woodwork using power tools & manual tools (table saw, miter saw, router table, band saw, planer, etc)
  * Metal working
  * Ceramics casting
  * Jewelry making
  * 3D printing (resin and reel)
  * Laser cutting (48 x 24)
  * Vacuum forming
  * Robotics
  * Paint spraying (just bought a five stage paint blower)
  * CNC (small format, would like to add a 5-axis eventually)
  * Shoot build videos
  * Electronics design & diagnostics (just finished my new ESD workbench with component storage)
  * Laundry
  * Mini-CostCo with freezer section

Will be adding a 48x48 CNC in the coming weeks, once I finish some more cabinets

What I cannot do in my garage:

  * Park a car
  * Find enough time to do what I want

If you've got a 4x8 CNC and/or large format laser cutter, you pretty much have a small business at that point. It is then up to you how you monetize it.

I used to work for a manufacturing company that started out as a married couple making Christmas ornaments with a $2000 laser cutter/engraver.

Screen printing is a pretty easy business to do out of a garage - you can either print and sell your own designs or print for others. Unless there are already a lot of screen printers in your area odds are there are businesses and organizations that would love to make some cheap swag with their logos. I haven't checked but I have to imagine there's a "xometry for screen printing" service out there that you could probably get semi-consistent work from.

Honestly though, so long as you don't need to quit your day job today, you can probably find some good deals on some used cnc equipment that will let you make anything while staying in your current price range. The difficulty is not in determining what's possible but rather what's profitable. Most garage manufacturing companies tend to make some incredibly niche thing like a bracket that allows you to stick a camera on a particular item used for a particular hobby; stuff that anyone could make but no big companies care enough to develop. Most of the time these are tinkerers who make lots of little widgets to solve their own problems and one of them eventually takes off.

If your goal is just to make money, I would suggest selling products that can be made by some service like xometry until you stumble across something that's popular, then you can bring manufacturing in house to increase your margins.

The legality should interest you. I saw someone have their small business shut down by police because they were running it out of their basement. It wasn't the noise or pollution (which realistically are the nuisances you're going to be inflicting on neighbors) but the excess cars parked and delivery trucks coming and going down the street. One neighbor ratted them out.

The problem with the space isn't really the capital but noise abatement, waste disposal, and inventory. The ideal product would be quiet to make, not use tough chemicals to dispose, and materials you can buy in bulk and small enough not to take up a ton of space in the worksite.

I currently manufacturer a fairly niche product with nothing but a 7 year old $250 3d printer, some off the shelf parts, and a bit of custom electronics. Very high profit margin, as I am the only producer of this item (!).

I'd love to move to a more "robust" process, but options for materials and widespread access to 3d printing provides a lot of versatility for a single-person business where I want to control the entire product and process end-to-end.

Just need to find your niche.

An awful lot of stuff. I wouldn't even know where to begin, especially if you're willing to consider a hybrid model where some parts / sub-assemblies are manufactured elsewhere and delivered to you (for example, having PCB's produced by OSHpark or PCBway, etc.) and you do final assembly in the garage.

If it were me, I'd also be looking at scenarios that involve any kind of "thing" that I could acquire cheaply and re-purpose somehow. Making lamps out of old wine bottles, that sort of thing.

Robots, unmanned vehicles of various sorts, all sorts of small electronic gadgets, probably some auto accessories... really, the range of things you could (at least hypothetically) manufacture in a space that size is huge.

Now whether or not you could manufacture the thing at scale may be a different question. You could probably easily accommodate doing something the size of a small home appliance (think: washing machine size) if you only had to do one at a time. But doing that at scale might well require more space. So is the intent to stay in the garage and run an enduring business there, or just to ship a prototype, prove the model, and then maybe expand? Or is this purely an academic thought experiment?

Small batch soaps, candles, "bath oils" and such can be done with minimal capital and little regulatory oversight.

Print shop type things, especially specialized like vinyl cutting and large banners, could be a good business depending on where you're at. Might be able to buy used or lease equipment too.

Woodworking / furniture shop and / or antique furniture restoration might not be terribly capital intensive.

A friend and I manufacture a laser party light that makes your feet glow in a space smaller than most garages.

Just a 3d printer, some custom cut metal pieces, the actual electronic components and some soldering irons. [0]

[0] https://toeglo.com

You're thinking of this in reverse. First find something you want to manufacture, then figure out how to build it in your garage.

Don't be the solution searching for a problem!

Seeds, saplings, etc. Small houseplants and barely sprouted houseplants sell for a lot on Etsy and other sites and require very moderate amounts space and money. The difficulty is skill. Plants can be hard to grow and it’s easy to make a mistake that ruins lots of your crop!

Here's a tour of the late Grant Imahara's workshop. He worked on robotics and, I believe, props in there?

He's got a pretty significant amount of capability -- "CNC mills, laser cutters, lathes, paints, electronics, work tables, and, of course, multiple 3D printers" -- built into a space that looks closer to a 1-car garage than a 2-car garage.

edit: here's the actual link https://youtu.be/hsCSTO8SaQU

Sam Zeloof alone managed to manufacture chips with the early 1970s technology in his garage using old fab equipment bought cheap (sadly don't remember the exact budget): http://sam.zeloof.xyz/

Maybe with more people and more capital this could be scaled to something that can be sold, like replicas of classic CPUs.

Many small scale manufacturing suppliers operate on that scale - or at least could, with sufficient organization. And maybe fudging a bit and using the driveway as a loading dock to store materials and outgoing products.

Lathe, CNC Mill, Drill Press, Bandsaw, Bend Brake, CNC laser/plasma cutter. That'd be the basics of a fully featured metal shop. Buying used and upgrading as you bring in some revenue would keep you under your price target.

I would suggest looking at the mechanical puzzle community.

A quick look around https://puzzleparadise.net/ will reveal many people willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for bespoke homemade sequential discovery puzzles made with laser cutting, woodworking, 3D printing, CNC, mill, lathe, custom PCBs, etc.

To go further down the rabbit hole see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j5V0nECn9hqUCmPmxPqi...

With a really good graphic/packaging designer you could make small batch, die cut and laser cut packaging. Stores flat, materials are cheap. Bring some fancy samples to farmers markets and craft fairs, pitch people who want prototype or short run packaging on Kickstarter, etc.

You'll never outcompete a large market, but for people making < 1000 of a thing, there's not a lot of options.

Have you ever seen a MagLite flashlight? (Or a clone)? The batteries are kept in place by a threaded cap which is spring loaded. My neighbor manufactures the caps, alone, in his garage. Cuts the threads and installs the spring. As far as noise I do hear his air compressor occasionally. You can buy quiet air compressors but they are orders more expensive than a standard unit.

Small aircraft. https://www.kitplanes.com/17-kits-for-under-25k/

Black Garlic maybe? But it's energy intensive, because it needs constant high temperatures for months.

Saying this because I recently discovered it, and like it, because it's basically garlic without the 'stink', useful for spicing up many things, again without the stink. Hard to describe. Anyways, it's seen as a gourmet thing. So one maybe could make some money with it, without much volume. OTOH energy isn't getting cheaper. Dunno. See and search for yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garlic

With some woodworking equipment you could make loudspeaker enclosures. Add a CNC machine and you’ll be making enclosures just as good as the big brands.

That size and capital outlay could be the basis for a very nice custom furniture/woodworking shop; but the skills necessary would require some work to gain.

Someone is basically doing that for keyboards, though they mainly rebox/ship from China.

I guess at that scale your not looking to beat anyone on price. Your going for bespoke quality, I'd say. So you want something that people pay a lot for already so you can charge more and put the word "bespoke" in front of it.

One idea I had was bicycle frames, if you know arc welding. Custom size frames or of unique design go for a lot. I guess it depends on how fiddly they get, but if you can bang out the standard fittings then the main part should be quite quick to put togther.

With a fairly basic set of woodworking tools, you can turn out high-quality cutting boards and charcuterie boards pretty easily. Advantages of these include the fact that they're easy to produce in batches and don't take up a lot of space to store (so it's straightforward to keep some inventory on hand). I've done this and ended up with a steady drip-feed of local sales. It's a nice source of pocket money, though not a reliable one.

My brother used to cast resin pen blanks in the garage. It's a pretty simple process that just needs a few silicone molds, a pressure vessel, and a vacuum pump. He sold them wholesale to a woodworking supply place for $5-10 each. He made enough over a couple years to pay for college.

Small customized souvenirs for local tourist attractions or shops.

Ask in nearby townhalls if they would like some souvenirs for visiting important guests, some commemorative stuff for various contests.

Ask local hardware shop owners if they have ideas for custom brackets or some parts that could be easily machined but are unreasonably expensive.

Ask nearby sawmill owner if they need anything machined, typically they have requests from clients for some simple parts but don't have resources to have own people manning cnc's. Typically they will have requests for wooden or metal ornaments or curved parts of wooden windows, maybe artistic cabinet doors or house doors.

Wooden and metal signs for various shops.

Almost anything smaller than a breadbox. I’m not trying to be flippant, but those are better starting conditions than I had for the moderately profitable craft kit or outdoor product manufacturing businesses I’ve run. Inventory is more likely to constrain your space than equipment, and power supply is more likely to constrain your equipment than budget.

An apartment.

Might or might not be legal. The disadvantage is you can only make one, but the advantage is recurring revenue once you've made it.

That was the stated goal of Defense Distributed, to allow manufacture of firearms in your garage. Dunno what happened to them after one of the founders got arrested for personal legal problems. Thought it was an interesting concept, though.

Lionheart Kombucha in Portland Oregon started in a garage, and now is made out of his basement! He has a 3000gal fermenter down there that gets inspected. He used to give lessons at his house on how to make your own.

A machine shop with a lathe and a mill, especially CNC, can manufacture just about anything.

I personally refurbish electronics. It's nice and quiet.

I don't know if this would be within your budget but custom enclosures made of hot-bent plexi. they look really nice and I think there is demand within hobby electronic makers.

I know of at least a few businesses that got off the ground in a garage with a little 3-axis CNC mill and a few ideas. Find an area thats underserved and come up with a better idea.

My old neighbor makes custom collars for pets (and for certain group people as well). He lost his shoe repair business a few years back, but using his skills, he’s doing pretty well.

His collars aren’t just leather bells. He adds engraving, GPS, jewels and vegan options. it’s crazy how much people are willing to spend on their pets.

Here's an idea: Maybe look around for You Tubers who are creating one-off 3d models and pitching them to do a product run.

If you want to see what something like this could look like, Aaron Parecki designed a very clever stand for a video device called an ATEM Mini, and started with one-off 3d prototypes he was printing. He validated the idea, then sourced up to a small -- just a bit bigger than a garage -- "factory" that would be like what you're describing.

Here is a tour of the "factory" https://youtu.be/ljaEnoJZ8OY?t=1071

Might help you source ideas by looking at what some creators are prototyping on their channels, then pitching a small scale factory run of the devices.

I convert old photo negative enlargers to UV enlargers for printing with alternative processes (cyanotype in particular).

It doesn't take much space and I do it out of my small European town house basement. Which also serves as my photo lab for demonstrations.

I suspect you would avoid things that could be automatized, and rather focus on something that has relatively high margins due to either customization/personal touch or fit & finish reasons. It probably helps if the overall market isn't massive too, just plenty big enough for a small team.

e.g. find a sport or hobby that requires tools/components that can be manufactured in your 2-car/2 person setting. Then give them customization or very high quality. CNC is basically commodity now, as are 3D prints - you need something outside that box I think, or at least have it only be a component of what you are doing.

Given the nature of technology these days, with the ready available of grid power, next day shipping, and wide variety of information on demand, it's easier to describe the limits to what can be made.

Obviously - illegal stuff.

Anything bigger than about 8 foot in length, or more than 1000kg in mass. If you can pick it up solo, you might be able to build it.

Machining wise, you can buy tools to measure down to a micron, and harbor freight has stuff to get you to 25 microns. Used machine tools are widely available.

Integrated circuits are outside your time and dollar budget. But Sam Zeloof could give you pointers.

It's an amazing time to be a maker!

Get a commercial dehydrator. You can make dehydrated fruit and veg, trail food, jerky, dried herbs, tea and lots of other things.

You can grow gourmet or medicinal mushrooms with a handmade flow hood, a pressure cooker and two grow tents.

One of my friends does 3D printed and resin casted cosplay armor/props out of his garage. Low volume, high margins.

Check out your local farmers market and flea market. Everything there will be game. I bet granola would be pretty cheap. Inventory doesn't rot, shelf stable product, potential to automate the entire thing too.

In Ukraine we are building combat drones and UAVs. Lots of these startups around the country and some will successfully monetize after the war, especially given track of success on the battlefield.

I saw a pontoon houseboat built in a 2-car garage by a shop teacher. Assembled outside of course. People even live in these puppies.

Can beat a lake-cabin, especially for people who live near lots of connected lakes.

I make pine bookshelves using 1"x12"xN" boards with dados.

T-shirt printing, leather craft, 3d printing long-tail plastic parts for things where spare parts are no longer available, small-scale electronics manufacturing, hydroponic production of fresh ingredients for local restaurants, embroidery, concrete countertop/sink production, glass work for smoking, classic car restoration, kit car production, hobby steam engine production, tiny wood shop, CNC production for sale on Etsy, jewelry crafting. Those are ones I can think of off the top of my head.

I know a few people who make stuff to do with hobbies. For example I know one person who makes fishing lures and another who makes ham radio antennas. Oh, and another friend who make rubber melee weapons for LARPing.

What they do is fairly simple and doesn't need CAD experience or the use of CNC machines/3D printers. The key thing is to make a good quality product, offer good customer service and work to get word of mouth advertising.

People with hobbies and disposable income are a good market to target.

Small powerboats. The biggest market for recreational boats is the 3.5 to 5m trailer boats. What people don't realise is while the market appears to be saturated with generic boat manufacturers, almost every boat buyer wants some kind of customisation that is often trivially cheap and quick to do with the right equipment.

The key skillset required is the ability to weld (for aluminium boats) and a garage set up to hold up boats while they're being assembled or customized.

One thing I've wanted someone to start making for years is good ski/snowboard racks for snowmobiles.

The ones that (almost) everyone I know have break frequently. They would be easy to make out of stainless with a couple small jigs.

https://cheetahfactoryracing.com/products/board-ski-bracket-...

The market is probably pretty small, but I'd definitely buy two sets ;)

I have a dream of producing custom recumbents. I don't know where to get thin-walled pipes, but a start capital is roughly as you have described.

Last year I was looking for DIY techniques for waterproofing camping gear and I found this vidy about 'welding' rip-stop nylon. After this I had a few days of daydreaming about making backpacking and camping equipment. I would add 'textiles' to the list of garage-doable manufacturing. You need sewing machine, workbench, and other hand tools.

The thing I got stuck on was inventory. You need to have raw materials (either buying in bulk or buying bulk when you get a good deal) and unless you're MTO, you're keeping inventory. That fills up space and ties up your cash. Not a fun daydream after that point.

For the adventure seekers among us who like to prototype their own gear I found the link: https://youtu.be/Ne2J01h1tZ0

I've a good few friends that either started or run small mnufactruing businesses out of a garage or spare room. Those that moved to dedicated premises only did so once it made sense financially and were already supporting their family. Some moved rural, supporting a bigger workshop.

I have 3 car garage, with one car in it, the rest is workshop. That fits ample tracking, several metalworking machines, bench space and tool storage. I don't run a full fledged business, just hobby jobs, but it could easily support as much.

I've seen clean rooms, home built automated manufacturing rigs and labs I'd wish for at work, all in people's sheds. I truly believe a small workshop can do wonders. The capabilities of small modern equipment, and the ability to outsource jobs/parts by email only makes this easier.

(edit: formatting)

Dietary supplements. US regs are lax as hell and a capsule filling machine is 20k. Tablet making machine is cheaper. But if you’re not worried about legality, pressing ecstasy pills is a better business lol. But seriously, you can make your own blends of herbs etc according to market demand.

If you want to create an economically viable business, focus first on how you're going to profitably locate, attract and sell to a growing pool of new customers. The vast majority of businesses which fail, do so due to a lack of Customers not a lack of Product.

cutting gemstones has a pretty low capital cost to get started, a couple of workbenches worth of grinding and polishing equipment plus a diamond-saw

there's lots of tutorials on youtube, seems like a gratifying hobby with a potential for profit if you take it seriously as a day job

>not particularly interested in the legality

Counterfeit board games.

About a million things? Art, furniture, metal gears, food, seedlings, chickens, printed t-shirts, shoes, electronics, bicycles, pottery, brooms, woven fabric, a bespoke suit. A car.

It'd be easier to list what you can't manufacture in a 2 car garage.

Nuclear reactor? https://kidsdiscover.com/quick-reads/arkansas-teen-builds-nu...

A family member of mine did motorcycle trailer hitches and other related things for years out of a two car garage. Eventually they got big enough that they needed to expand and did so, at least to some success.

Meal kits for low income groups. Buy ingredients directly from producers. Sell the kits directly to local consumers if you can reach them. Sell indirectly via regional resellers that could be registered online and place their orders via a web channel as simple as a Google form. About the meals, don't worry about anything fashionable or attractive to middle class consumers like "low carb", "organic" or the like. Make something hunger oriented. A meal that could satisfy an empty stomach as a priority.

Made in USA safety razor.

There have been a few pop up, seemingly sell really well, then disappear for unknown reasons. I think Weber was the last one, and they became highly sought after.

Charge 150 bucks a pop, people will buy it.

https://www.80percentarms.com/

Build unfinished receivers for firearms. Might not stay legal much longer though.

Anything you can 3D print or make with a small machining center I would assume. It's amazing how compact and efficient that stuff is.

Have a look at 3dhubs. (www.hubs.com)

You need the correct property zoning to operate a business from your basement.

Your house is very likely in a residential zone, which limits it to residential use only (some exceptions apply, allowing home office scenarios for people who live there, but limits employees from travelling to your house for work).

Why do these rules exist? Well, to regulate industrial expansion, limit noise, traffic and road congestion (parking) in residential areas.

YMMV

It's only profitable if your time is worth nothing, but you can build a kit plane like the Vans RV-7 in a garage for around that startup cost.

Wall Art, like posters, could be manufactured at home.

> I am not particularly interested in the legality of this at the moment. But safety considerations could be important.

Very illegal: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/gadget/ar-15-full-auto-sear-...

A CNC plasma cutter, sand blasting, and paint booth (with additional supporting equipment) can support a business for making really fancy signs for businesses.

This guy on YouTube is basically exactly that: https://www.youtube.com/c/42Fab

Niche, NLA car parts for older cars. 3d print to prototype, machine with a mill and/or lathe. Or better, CNC mill.

Custom length power/data cables like SATA/SAS with various connectors. The biggest obstacle would be that you'd need to test them, but you could start doing so with second-hand hardware. Pair it with a nice website with instant pricing calculator, and I bet you will see business.

My son manufactures pattern-welded steel billets for knife makers (so-called Damascus). In his garage.

3D print tabletop game pieces. Lots of tabletop games use cards. Having physical pieces adds a nice touch.

Either an electromagnetic gadget that reduces any object's weight or a wonky time machine. /s

If you're not interested in legality, then technically cooking meth or something similar (amphetamine, mephedrone or other drugs popular in the neighborhood) would bring the best ROI, but it might not best from safety perspective for a variety or reasons.

This might be the scifi author in me speaking, but I think fungi and other similar natural resources are a valuable target. This is actually something I want to look into in the future, even if only in theory.

Small mechanical and 3D-printed parts. Lockpicking kits, custom engraved objects.

If you're ignoring legality, then the list is very long. Choose something that you know and are interested in. Figuring out how to produce it quickly and in large quantities is a secondary concern.

Jet engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJr-RmJxtDc

Airplanes. E/AB are slow enough to build that even if you are working full time they are still one-of-a-kind creations and can be built and sold.

Zombie box type stuff. (generator quieting devices)

I've also been curios, for some time now, but got no concrete good examples. Good question! Hope you'll get some good answers!

well, you can manufacture a gun [0] from materials procured from your hardware store. Of course that would likely be illegal in many juridictions first to manufacture, then to sell.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Luty#Firearms_design

Hot sauce or other condiments or pastries.

Tech augmentations where you add features to a product, tear down, solder up, assemble back and QA.

Stupid question if you'd ask me. You can build anything, really. Whatever you set your mind to mate.

3D printing for vintage cars. But you sorta need to be embedded in it to know what’s needed.

probably jewelry like this https://patrickadairdesigns.com/collections/all-products

HP started in a garage. So did Apple.

And some dude built a nuke in his. Have fun.

Live edge wood tables.

Tiny wooden boxes.

You can CNC cut carbon fiber for custom UAVs.

New kind of transport/sports devices.

Grow medical weed or mushrooms.

You can manufacture metal-core PCB LED modules and fixtures with your starting mentioned capital. For power, you can either do an on-board solution or provide external power drivers matched to your LED layout.

Bare unbranded extruded aluminum fixtures can be had COTS and cheap, and you can either get a board house to design boards for you, or link up starboards to populate the fixtures. A small SMT oven can be had for starting at $500 out of China, though making an SMT oven to solder components to a metal PCB is as simple and cheap as a couple of half-silvered halogen bulbs in a workshop fixture, and a reflective metal top replacing the cage. Due to the nature of metal-PCB rework and how it basically ignores thermal profile recommendations, don't worry too much about following a specific thermal reflow profile on the first reflow attempt, just make sure you're getting hot enough at a decent-but-not-blistering speed to ensure all solders down, and then back off the heat immediately and allow the board to cool down. Adjust the height of the board from the light fixture or adjust exposure time or both as necessary to deal with soldering issues.

Plastic stencils that match your LED/component pad profile/layout are easy and cheap to manufacture (or buy pre-made.) Solder paste is fairly cheap (though there are some that get expensive, like the indium-bearing solders.) Most components are relatively simple to hand-place as long as your solder stencil job is properly-done and the components aren't too tightly-packed together and tiny, though small high-speed dual-nozzle pick and place SMT machines can be had for around $5K ($2500 or so used.)

I suggest looking into servicing the UV market, as that is the market that is blooming. The pandemic has boosted the need for disinfection-capable UV LEDs (specifically UVC,) and also this becomes a boon for other markets, like fluorescent mineral photography, minerals location (things like scheelite are easier to find via their glow when excited by UV radiation at certain wavelengths.) UVA is also showing some experimental results at disinfection, and despite the need for more power to achieve the results, UVA LEDs are much more efficient than UVC, and much cheaper to obtain, so there might be potential there as well if more research is performed and validated.

Alternatively, you can go the simpler route of being an assembly house instead of a manufacturing house, buy fixtures, and pre-populated boards that are designed to mount in said fixtures, make working units, sell those. I did precisely this with another person, literally out of their garage, making aquarium lighting for a while - LED strips, screws, extruded aluminum heatsinks, plastic 'lens' inserts, power wire with switch, water-sealing grommets, power supplies, extrusion end caps. If you work hard, make the right development decisions, and advertise effectively, you can easily grow into something that is sustainable and rewarding.

Soap

- Kombucha leather

- LSD

Beer!

A car? Google wikispeed

Shrooms. Good stuff.

Smart surfboards!

JTAG boards.

Cosplay gear

Beer!

Drugs.

Gin

Delta 8 vape carts. The license to do it legally is easy to get. You can buy all the material you'll need from Marijuana Packaging and Fresh Bros. I used to run a small CBD business out of a rented shop in Minnesota.

https://marijuanapackaging.com/collections/filling-machines-...

https://freshbros.com/product-category/bulk-products

If you can mentally handle the next multi-billion dollar opportunity, I suggest:

The 1st free & clean energy device: https://www.KryonEngine.org

Outside of small scale Etsy-tier tech/non-tech stuff? Nothing. What a garage is good for though is prototyping and prototyping related R&D. Given that you have a 20k-50k USD budget, perhaps you should look for cheap commercial property for rent.