Okay, so here it finally isâ I was busier this weekend than I expected, but now I finally have the pictures!
This is a story I like to call âthe time I almost died in schoolâ.
So about five years ago, I was a senior in high school, and I was making a lap steel in my woodworking class. We had an absolute beast of a CNC machine in the workshop, and I only had a few months until graduation, so I wanted to take advantage of the machine at least once while I still had access, and so I decided to make some nice Bolivian Rosewood pickup covers for the guitar.
I only had a few pieces of the wood to make covers out of, so I did a ton of test pieces out of oak until I got everything set up perfectly. I had found that the material was so thin and brittle however, that if I did the routing first, and had the pole piece holes drilled out afterwards, the piece would break.
On this day, I decided to do one final test with the oak to see if I could drill the holes first, and then route the shape out afterwards. As usual, the workpiece was screwed down to the MDF surface of the CNC, the bit was calibrated, and I was ready to go. I started the program, and started running, and the bit plunged into the wood, but it was immediately clear something was wrong. The spindle had rapidly plunged to full depth and was spinning at around 30k RPMâ WAY TOO FAST FOR ANY DRILL BIT!!! (I later checked the program, and everything was set up normally, so itâs at have been some sort of catastrophic error that real all parameters as maximum)
I hit the emergency stop button, but it took a second to kick in. I saw the workpiece wiggling, then all of a sudden there was a big cracking sound. Part of the workpiece had been ripped from the rest of it, and was trapped on the rapidly spinning drill bit. I dove to the floor, and as I was dropping down, I saw something fly right towards me. Next thing I knew there was a deafening gunshot sound.
The wood that had been captive on the bit exploded, and hurdled right towards me. Another kid in the classroom said that it only missed my head by an inch or twoâ if I had waited until I saw it fly off, I wouldnât have reacted in time, and it wouldâve struck me right between the eyes. I was wearing a heavy duty face shield, but even that wouldnât have been nearly enough to save me. I have no doubt that it wouldâve killed me in an instant.
Just a moment later, I was looking for the pieces that went flying off, when I noticed what caused that gunshot sound. The oak projectile had hit into the cinder block wall, leaving a massive crater over 3/4â deep, and with a diameter of a good 5-6â. I later found just part of the pieceâ just the part that flew towards me and shattered the cinder block, and it was surprisingly still mostly in tact. You can see a dent where the corner hit the cinder block.
I keep the piece on my shelf in my bedroom now as a reminder that even when you take every precaution and do everything the right way, the tools can still be ready to take your life. I always treat power tools with the utmost respect and caution, but it isnât a two way streetâ tools arenât gonna spare you just because youâre careful.
here are some pics of the sole surviving piece of the catastrophic drill incident, as well as one of the successful Bolivian Rosewood end products for comparison. I know itâs not a pedal, but it is guitar related, and none of my enclosure drilling botches comes close to the absolutely terrifying insanity of the time I almost lost my brains from drilling a piece of oak on a CNC machine.
Sometimes I can envision a box in all three dimensions at once. Other times, the box looks at me and scoffs.
