Photo by William Warby from Pexels
I spent fourteen hours in front of a computer monitor Friday through Monday, fighting a set of complex CAD fillets where the fuselage and wing meet on a high-speed drone airframe. In aerodynamics, if you don’t smooth out those exact junctions, you get hit with massive interference drag that wrecks your drag coefficient and kills your flight efficiency to pieces. It was exhausting, technical, and rigid. So when I finally stepped away from digital hell, I went straight into my shop and faced my wood lathe head-on.
I worked on, and completed, my very first segmented wooden bowl. It’s far from perfect. If you’ve never built a segmented piece, the process sounds straightforward enough: you cut dozens of wood blocks at very precise angles and glue them together into a ring. Then you stack the rings with perfect concentricity and mount the block on the lathe. If your alignment is off by even a fraction of a millimeter on one side, that section becomes paper-thin within seconds of your gouge touching it. Turn it one second too long, and the wall blows right through.
I have two completely shattered bowls sitting prominently on my house mantel right now. I keep them there on purpose. They are my “don’t be a dumbass” trophies—reminders of what happens when you get sloppy, rush a cut, or are not precise in your setup.
The Water That Bites Back#
Standard woodworking with power tools requires respect, but it operates on predictable rules, like “Don’t stick your fingers in a spinning blade.” It’s like fishing in a quiet freshwater lake: you have to pay attention, but nothing swimming beneath the surface is actively coming to eat you.
Woodturning is like wade fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Years ago, I was wade fishing in Corpus Christi Bay when I hooked a nice redfish. I put it on a stringer attached to my waders. What I didn’t fully pay attention to in that moment was that the thrashing movement of that fish was sending out a high-frequency dinner bell through the water. Now I didn’t see them, but in my mind I knew that there were sand sharks circling my legs. Sand sharks are not giant, but they have sharp teeth, and I suddenly realized I was standing in an environment, unlike a lake, that could bite back.
General woodworking versus turning is, to me, a fitting parallel to this. And I have the scars on my hands to prove it. While I’ve managed to avoid close encounters with shark teeth, I’ve been bitten more than once while woodturning.
When a bowl is spinning at 2,000 RPM, you are holding a razor-sharp piece of steel against a mass of changing wood grain guided by experience and faith. If your tool edge isn’t seriously sharp, or if your angle shifts by a fraction of a degree, the gouge catches. In a microsecond, the bowl comes off the chuck or, in a worse case, comes apart, sending sharp hardwood shrapnel directly at your face, hands, and chest. I know this from experience.
The Price of Admission#
Woodturning doesn’t care about your ego, your engineering degree, or how long you’ve been building things. It humbles you instantly.
It forces you into a test of human willpower: How fast can you learn to do something right before your mistakes bite you on the ass?
To succeed at it—or to fix a complex 3D aerodynamic model, or to push a new aircraft toward its maiden flight—you have to cross a line from casual interest into quiet obsession. Some people look at a shattered bowl or a failed CAD surface and walk away, deciding the frustration isn’t worth the effort. But survival in craftsmanship, engineering, and life usually belongs to the people who refuse to give up.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on stoicism and Marcus Aurelius. The core lesson isn’t about suppressing emotion; it’s about learning when to shut up, step back, respect the reality of the world in front of you, and focus entirely on what you can control. You can’t force the wood to conform to a bad cut, just like you can’t force air to flow smoothly over an unfilleted wing. You simply have to refine your technique, sharpen your tools, and face the lathe again. Failure is the root of learning, if you will simply let it teach you.
Those shattered pieces on my mantel aren’t failures. They are just the price of admission for learning how to stay standing in the Gulf, regardless of the imagined consequences (I did it once, but I will never do again).
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