After 22 years making traditional carving tools, Gregg Blomberg is hanging up his adze.

The proprietor of Kestrel Tool, a small tool maker on Lopez Island, Washington, announced this month that he will shut down his business to pursue other interests. For more than two decades Blomberg has made traditional carving tools out of his rustic workshop in an island community north of Seattle. He is best known for his handmade adze, a handled blade that is swung like a hammer, and the crooked knife, a small carving tool that dates back several centuries.

“Most people are used to European tools like planes and chisels, but these are uniquely American tools,” Blomberg said. “They really are rooted in the American soil.”

Especially on the Northwest Coast, the adze and the crooked knife have a long history of use in carved Native American art such as masks and totems. However, Blomberg’s broad base of customers has ranged over the years from Native American tribes in Alaska and Canada to woodworkers and boatbuilders in the United States and Europe to East Coast home builders.

“In Santa Fe, woodworkers use the adze to add textured surfaces to Mission-style furniture,” he said. “Fine home builders use them for putting texture on beams.”

Blomberg got interested in making these traditional tools in a roundabout way. He studied gunsmithing out of high school, learning to heat-treat and work with metal, a skill that translated well to toolmaking.

“Some years later I moved to Washington and got interested in Northwest art,” he said. “I asked people ‘where do you get these tools?’ and they told me I had to make them.”

After making a few tools for personal use, his hobby turned into a business. Recently he has been fulfilling as many as 100 orders per month, making each tool to order.

“I could see this going to a place where I had to have an employee lunchroom, and I just wasn’t going to let that happen,” he said.

Blomberg said he tried to sell the business but could not find a serious bidder. He will take orders through May 1, 2006.

Kestrel Tool is online atwww.rockisland.com/~kestrel/

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