A ten-inch cherry bowl takes a skilled turner maybe ninety minutes at the lathe. It sells at a craft fair for $85. Do the math on an hourly rate and it looks almost respectable — until you count the two blanks that split on the lathe before this one came out clean, the roughed-out blank that sat in a paper bag for four months waiting to dry, the $40 you spent on a diamond-tip parting tool this year, and the booth fee you paid to stand behind the table that sold it. Suddenly $85 doesn't look like profit. It might not even cover cost.
Most woodturners never run that math. They price by feel, by what the last craft fair customer paid without flinching, or by a rule of thumb they picked up in a forum thread years ago. That's fine for a hobby. It's a problem the moment turning becomes a business — because the IRS, and eventually your own bank account, will ask you to prove the difference.
The Diameter-Times-Height Formula (And Why It's a Starting Point, Not an Answer)
Ask a room full of production bowl turners how they price a piece, and a huge number will land on some version of the same equation:
Price = Diameter × Height × Multiplier
The multiplier typically runs from about 2 to 5, depending on wood species, finish quality, and local market. A plain, sound maple bowl might use a 2.5 multiplier. Burl, spalted wood, or a piece with carved or pyrography embellishment can justify 5, 6, or even 7. Some turners use a flat per-inch scale instead — roughly $8 to $10 per inch of diameter for smaller pieces, scaling up to $16–$18+ per inch past 16 inches, or "market rate" beyond that.
Both approaches share the same appeal: they're fast, they scale reasonably with size, and they give customers a price that feels proportionate to what they're holding. That's genuinely useful at a craft fair table where you can't stop to run a spreadsheet for every buyer.
The problem is what the formula quietly leaves out. Diameter times height times a multiplier prices the finished, surviving piece. It says nothing about the blank that split on the lathe last Tuesday, the chainsaw gas and bar oil that went into bucking the log, or the eight months of shelf space the roughed blank occupied while it dried. A formula built entirely around the object in your hands treats every other cost as if it doesn't exist — which is exactly how production turners end up working full days for what amounts to minimum wage once they actually total their expenses.
Why a Cracked Blank Is a Loss, Not a COGS Line
This is the accounting distinction that trips up almost every turner who tries to get serious about pricing: a blank that cracks before it becomes inventory is not a cost of goods sold on the bowl that did sell. It's a separate loss.
Here's the difference in practice. Say you rough-turn five blanks from a green log:
- Three survive drying and become finished, saleable bowls.
- Two develop through-cracks during drying and get scrapped or turned into smaller, lower-value pieces (a natural-edge bowl becomes a bottle stopper blank, or firewood).
The wood, fuel, and lathe time that went into the two failures were real expenses in the period you incurred them. They belong on your books as spoilage/scrap loss, expensed when the loss is identified — not silently folded into the price of the three bowls that made it, and not carried forward as if they were still an asset. If you instead try to recover those costs by inflating the price of the survivors, you lose the information you actually need: how much waste your process generates, and whether a technique change (thinner walls, better end-grain sealing, a different drying schedule) is worth adopting because it's cutting real dollars in scrap.
Turners who work green wood and twice-turn bowls — rough-turning oversized, letting the blank dry and move, then finish-turning to final shape — report failure rates that range widely by species, wall thickness, and drying method. Some report splits well under 1% with a disciplined process (even wall thickness, a slow controlled dry, sound wood selection); others working thicker-walled or single-turned pieces see meaningfully higher loss. The number matters less than the habit: track it. If you rough out 40 blanks a quarter and 6 of them fail, that's a 15% attrition rate, and it's a real cost of doing business — one your diameter-times-height price needs to absorb across the whole batch, not pretend doesn't exist.
A simple way to fold that back into pricing without losing the loss data: calculate your effective yield-adjusted material cost. If a log section costs $30 in fuel and time to buck and rough, and your historical attrition rate for that species/thickness combination is 15%, your true expected material cost per surviving blank is $30 ÷ 0.85 ≈ $35.30 — not $30. Use that adjusted number when you're deciding whether your multiplier is high enough, but keep booking each actual failure as a loss in the period it happens so you can see the attrition rate change over time.
What Actually Belongs in Your Price
Pull the diameter-times-height number apart and it's really standing in for five separate cost categories. Pricing more deliberately doesn't mean abandoning the quick formula — it means periodically checking it against the real numbers so the multiplier you're using is grounded in something.
1. Materials, fully loaded. Not just what you paid for a burl blank from a supplier — also chainsaw fuel and bar oil for wood you harvested yourself, sandpaper (a genuinely large cost over a year of production turning), finish, buffing compounds, and any hardware (rims, stands, inlay material).
2. Labor time, honestly counted. Time at the lathe is the obvious piece, but add rough-turning, sanding (often as long as turning itself), finishing, photographing, and listing or booth setup. A bowl that takes 90 minutes on the lathe can easily represent three to four hours of total labor once everything around it is counted.
3. Drying and storage. A roughed blank sitting in a paper bag or on a rack for months isn't free — it's occupying shop space and tying up capital in wood that isn't generating revenue yet. Production shops with high volume sometimes discount this, but if you're renting shop space, it's a real carrying cost.
4. Overhead. Lathe and tool depreciation, sharpening equipment and consumables, dust collection, electricity, insurance, booth and show fees, website or marketplace fees (Etsy and payment processors both take a cut), and vehicle costs for hauling wood or attending shows.
5. Scrap and failure, tracked separately. As above — expensed as a loss when it happens, and used to compute a yield-adjusted material cost for pricing purposes.
Add profit margin on top of all five, and you have a price that will actually sustain a business rather than just cover the wood.
Hobby or Business? The Line the IRS Actually Draws
Selling a bowl here and there at a farmers market is one thing. The moment you're regularly turning with the intent to make a profit, the IRS expects you to treat it as a business — and that distinction changes what you can and can't do on your tax return.
If your turning is classified as a hobby, you report the income, but you generally cannot deduct expenses against it — no writing off wood, sandpaper, finish, or lathe depreciation. If it's a business, reported on Schedule C, you can deduct ordinary and necessary expenses, which is the only way the numbers above (materials, overhead, scrap losses) actually reduce your taxable income. The IRS weighs factors like whether you keep complete and accurate books, whether you run the activity in a businesslike manner, and whether you depend on the income — which is a good reason on its own to track costs by job rather than guessing at tax time.
Once you're filing as a business with net self-employment earnings of $400 or more, self-employment tax (15.3%) applies on top of income tax, and most states will expect sales tax collected on in-person and online sales — craft fair rules vary by state and sometimes even by individual show, so check before you set up a booth.
Keep Your Woodturning Books as Clean as Your Cuts
The habits that make a good turner — measuring twice, tracking wall thickness, knowing exactly where a bowl is in its drying cycle — are the same habits that make a sustainable small business: knowing your real material cost, tracking scrap separately from cost of goods sold, and pricing off actual numbers instead of a formula you've never checked. Beancount.io offers plain-text accounting that makes it straightforward to track material costs, batch attrition, and job-level profitability in files you fully own — no proprietary software lock-in, no black-box categorization. Get started for free and put the same precision into your books that you put into every bowl.