An Introduction

I’m Duane an Artist, husband and dad. Since a young age I was always creative, building models, hammering wood together and just be constructive. Also I did take a lot of things apart too. I had to figure out how they worked and were put together. For many years I had a handyman business and a full on wood shop. Now that my son is 2.5 years old and has just been totally addicted to 'diggers' for the past year, he helped me come up with this idea. I would be drawing pictures of diggers for him to color all the time. We also cut some of them out and played with them. Then it came to me that why not build him some out of wood. With all the issues with plastics these days using a natural, non-treated product, I would at least know that these were safe to play with. After many drawings, changes, my son doing 'the product testing' and helping me put them together, we had the first great little backhoe digger! Since then we have built many of them, painted them with children’s paints, some are multi coloured, some all one. We also created the excavator so that when we play together we both have something different to play with. With time and play I added the little hole for the seat to place the toy men into. As I create these myself, my son gets to see a toy just made for wood. The parts he calls digger parts! Our next toy that we are working on is a dump truck to go along with the diggers! Check out my website with more photos at http://www.dp1.ca/ and my new etsy shop at woodtoy.etsy.com