$120 an hour

Here's the next fancy tool I used to cut the sheets of copper down the middle, a pair of sheet metal snips. Now I could have had the sheets cut for me on a big shear. The cutting charge would have been $20 a sheet or $40 total. I was going to do this, mostly to make the shipping a bit easier I'd hoped. However, it seems the place the metal was coming from didn't have a shear. So the sheets would have been shipped to the company in New York I was buying them from. There they would have been uncrated, sheared, and packed up into a new, smaller crate, and shipped on to me. If I took them as full sheets it would just be shipped direct to me. While I can't claim using copper is very ecological to begin with, nor is importing special wide sheets, I just couldn't justify all the extra shipping and crating to get them in 48 inch squares.

Measuring and cutting the sheets, while a pain in the butt I must admit, only took 20 minutes total. Since doing it myself also saved me $40 this means it was like getting paid ( or not spending ) $120 an hour for that work. I don't know about you, but I consider that a good wage!