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When I first opened the box on the Metmo driver, I thought I was looking at a little lightsaber
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It certainly got the heft of one. In practice, it's not actually a lightsaber, but it is billed as the world's most satisfying driver, and I'd have to agree
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It's cool to hold, it's well engineered from some really amazing materials
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and it actually has a long, long heritage. The Metmo company is in the habit of
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identifying old cool tools from yesteryear and then bringing them into production in modern times, and that's what this is all about
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It's a ratcheting screwdriver, just for regular screws. The ratchet can turn the other way too, or it's got full lock-up
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capabilities. But more than that, it's also got a handle that folds down, so you can use it to torque down some
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really challenging situations, including lag bolts and things like this. But the original version of this tool was made about a hundred years ago by a man named Konrad Baumann
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He was a tool manufacturer in Germany, and these tools were made for about 70 years. The interesting thing is, though, that there aren't very many originals in existence
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so they probably never produced a whole lot of these. The people out at Metmo, back in September of
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2021, decided to focus on making a prototype, and by December of
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2021, they actually had a prototype that they put out to the crowdfunding world. And
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so far, they have brought in more than three million dollars to support their project
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It's their most popular project out of all five that they've ever run
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So let's just take a look right now and see what this baby can do. This tool does drive screws, as I'll show you, but
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I wanted to show you something that no other screwdriver can do, and that's
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driving some heavy-duty lag bolts. So I fitted the tool with an adapter and a half-inch socket, and by folding the handle down
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you get a lot of leverage. It's the same amount of leverage as if you were using a regular socket wrench
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And then you've got the ratchet action going on here as well, so
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if you don't want to grab your impact driver to drive lag bolts, this tool can certainly handle that
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It takes a fair amount of force to drive a lag screw into a hunk of wood like this, but
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the tool has no problem doing it, and you can tell that you're not overloading the tool at all. It's meant for this sort of thing, and it works really well, as you can see
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One of the things I really like about the driver is just the machininess of it. Finely machined parts working together like this are always
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quite fascinating to me. This is a close-up of the ratcheting mechanism, and you can see the spring-loaded cog goes up and down as this is rotated
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Wonderful materials, very well machined. I'd love to see how this thing is made, but certainly lag bolt installation is not the only thing
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you're going to use this for. You'll probably use it to drive screws. More often, and here you can see a
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short deck screw, just putting it into a 6x6 for you, so you can see how it works. Now, that's not sped up
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footage. That's just how fast it I'm using the tool, and you can see it works pretty fast, and that's because the ratchet is so free and easy
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You can just flip back and forth as you're driving at home, and when it comes time to take something out, just a flip of the lever and
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now it ratchets in the other direction. One of the big differences between the driver and Mr. Baumann's original is that
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the modern version just takes regular quarter-inch hex drive bits, which are universal. His original design, you had to buy their bits. Only their bits fit
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That's just a little concession to modernity that makes a lot of sense, too
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And one other thing that impresses me about this tool is that it wouldn't really exist if it wasn't for the internet and the way it's brought together people and
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designs and manufacturing opportunities and finances to bring a pretty cool thing to the world
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The Matmoh driver. May the force be with you
