Project 001: How a Garage CNC Machine and a Shared Obsession Built Something We're Proud Of

There's a version of this story where two guys with too much ambition and not enough sense just wanted to make something cool. And honestly, that's mostly accurate.

Virtus Machine Works started the way a lot of things do — with a conversation. Doug, a professional photographer, and Koby, a mechanical engineer, are avid golfers. Between rounds, the kind of talk that tends to happen is less about handicaps and more about gear. What's good. What's not. What could be better. And somewhere in those conversations, a question kept coming up: why is it so hard to find a divot tool that feels like it was actually made with care?

Not a stamped piece of pot metal with a logo pressed into it. Not something that rattles around in your bag and ends up in the parking lot. Something solid. Something you'd actually want to carry.

That question turned into a challenge. And the challenge turned into Virtus Machine Works.

The Idea

Neither of us set out to start a company. The original thought was simpler than that: we could make this, and if we love it, other people probably will too. It was the kind of bet you make when you believe in what your hands can do.

Doug brought the eye. Years behind a camera means you develop strong opinions about what something should look and feel like — the weight of it, the way light catches a surface, the difference between something that looks premium and something that is premium. Those instincts shaped the vision for what Project 001 needed to be from the very beginning.

Koby brought the means. An engineer by training and a maker by nature, he had the tools, the knowledge, and — crucially — the garage space to actually build the thing. That garage became the first (and only) Virtus Machine Works production facility.

The Work

What followed was over a year of design, iteration, and refinement.

The choice of brass was never really a question. Brass has weight and warmth that other metals don't. It develops a patina over time — it ages with you rather than wearing out. It feels intentional in your hand. For a tool that's meant to last a lifetime and then some, brass was the only answer.

Every one of the 50 pieces in this first run was machined on a small CNC machine right there in Koby's garage. Not outsourced. Not batch-produced in a facility somewhere. Made here, one at a time, with the kind of attention to detail that's only possible at that scale. The tolerances, the finish, the feel of the tines — all of it refined over months until it was exactly right.

Doug's role wasn't just aesthetic direction. As the finished pieces started taking shape, his photographer's eye became a quality check as much as anything else. If something didn't look right in the light, it wasn't right. That standard drove the work forward.

Why 50

This first release is 50 pieces. Each one is stamped with its own number — 1 of 50, 2 of 50, and so on through the run. That wasn't a marketing decision. It was an honest one.

Fifty is what we could make without compromising anything. Fifty lets us stand behind every single piece. It keeps this what it was always meant to be: something rare, made carefully, by people who care about it.

We're not trying to be the biggest. We're trying to be the best version of what we set out to make.

What Comes Next

Project 001 is the beginning. There's more in the works — more designs, more materials, more ideas that have been accumulating over the past year and a half of building this first one. But we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves. We wanted to do one thing first, and do it right.

If you're holding number 14, or number 38, or number 1 — we made that for you. We hope you carry it for a long time.

— Doug & Koby, Virtus Machine Works