Clearly .. tons of people spend more than that on gears of way less value (think GPUs for leisure purposes only).

Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full sponsorship or half easily.

I think that kind of donation exposure would open you to some legal risks. Now you're some kind of visible commercial entity, not just some random IP address in the tracker response.

These days people do fundraising for all sorts of reason and get money. One could always invent a good story to avoid explaining the real reason behind the gears.