Matt Wilkinson enjoys carving wooden tools both for function and display, his favorite is this intricately worked DeWalt cordless drill.
Matt Wilkinson doesn’t consider himself a woodworker, but he does like tools — at least his kind, like his hand-carved DeWalt drill. That one took him about a year to carve, “mostly winter work.”
The drill is his favorite, but Matt has carved many other tools out of wood. Back in the mid 1980s, “I started picking it up, looking at some of the tools I had and thinking I could duplicate them. That was basically it. I started out with a pipe wrench.”
Matt Wilkinson has a collection of over forty functional tools that that he has whittled out of wood since the mid-1980s.
Since then, he’s carved out somewhere between 40 and 50 tools from woods local to his West Virginia home, like walnut, butternut, maple or cherry. He’s done most of his whittling, as he calls it, with a pocket knife. Generally, the tools he carves are hand tools.
After he finishes a carving, “More or less, I just put ’em in the toolbox now,” he says. It’s a hobby, not a business. “I just thought it was something interesting to do,” Matt said. “Once I get started, I can do quite a bit of it.”
