I remember getting my first taste of using tools and doing some woodwork when I was tasked with making a wooden magazine rack back in school. It wasn’t the most elegantly designed craft work that I’d ever create, but never the less I was proud of what I had accomplished. Clearly those in authority at the school didn’t agree, as a few months later I saw someone throwing my work into a skip, the cheek! Anyway, my small magazine rack was child’s play compared to some of the woodwork designs I see around the Internet on a daily basis, and if you’re getting to the level where you can craft an entire super car or motorbike out of wood then you could probably churn out magazine racks in your sleep.

Our first carefully carved piece is a wooden super car, and while if you’re thinking that any decent woodwork artist would be able to craft a giant model of a super car you may be surprised to know that not only does this design work as any normal super car would, it can also zoom past a Porsche 911 without breaking a sweat!

The two seater ‘Splinter’ is literally an eco-friendly super car, made out of a combination of maple, plywood and MDF. Thanks to its wooden build the ‘Splinter’ weighs just 1,134kg, which is about 240kg less than the super lightweight Porsche 911. It’s partly thanks to this, teamed with a twin supercharged 4.6 litre V8 engine (its designers reckon it can still do up to 20mpg), that it can churn out a staggering 700bhp – almost 300bhp more than the Porsche 911 – and reach a top speed of 240mph at 0 to 60mph in just over three seconds.

I certainly share the designer’s enthusiasm for “the satisfaction involved in making something from a piece of wood” but I’m not so sure it can “prove the potential of wood as a material” especially as you’d think it has a higher danger of catching fire. Even the suspension is made of laminated wooden arms, with the springs made from orange wood. Unfortunately there are no plans to mass produce the vehicle, but designer Joe Harmon believes that an F1 car could one day be made of wood. Take a look at even more pictures of the ‘Splinter’ over here.

Istvan Puskas doesn’t know much about F1 or super cars, but he’s well aware that a working motorcycle can be made from wood. This Hungarian bloke spent two years designing and building a chopper style motorbike made out of weather-resistant black locust wood; complete with handlebars and exhaust pipes made from cow’s horns and deer antlers as decorations.

Photo: NBC

Surprisingly the bike works, thanks in part to an engine taken from a small Fiat that’s fed with petrol from a wooden barrel instead of a standard petrol tank. It doesn’t look like he’s built in any suspension though, so it’s probably not the best bike to take on a long journey down a bumpy road. Still, you have to commend Istvan for his genius and it looks like he really enjoys his creation, popping on a helmet with horns when he goes for a ride.

We obviously don’t all possess this level of creativity when it comes to woodwork, but just getting hold of some quality woodworking tools to make a start can lead you down routes you never thought possible. Who knows, you could end up designing a wooden aeroplane (not that we’d ever recommend using it).

Words by Thomas Mulrooney