I have a couple of mallets I use in the shop on a fairly
regular basis. One I mostly use where I
need to give things a good whack like setting lath centers. It is a good-sized round headed one made out
of hedge or Osage Orange. I made it
probably 30 plus years ago out of an old fence post. Hedge is extremely rot resistant and very
hard. One measure of hardness is the
Janka scale. This test measures the
amount of force required to embed a steel ball half way in the wood
sample. On this scale Red Oak has a
hardness of 1,220 pounds while Osage Orange comes in at 2,760 pounds or more
than twice as hard. I know that may be
more than you really wanted to know but I thought it was interesting. The other mallet is a smaller, lighter more
delicate one that I use for finer work that I inherited from my father-in-law
many years ago. My goal is to replace the hedge mallet with something having a little more mass and better balance than the existing one.
I came across a plan for one that with a few
modifications looked to fit my needs. As
I usually do I started with making a 3D drawing. One of the things that appealed to me was the
tapered, wedged mortise that the handle fits in. Below is the assembled piece and an exploded
view.
I decided to make two of the mallets as long as I was
doing it. The only real difference between the two is going to be the handle shape and the material. I want to make one oval handle and one more
rectangular. For the material, one is out
of White Oak (Janka hardness 1,335) and the other out of Mesquite (Janka
hardness 2,345). The oak one is from
some leftovers I had from a Craftsman futon I made about 10 years ago. The source of the mesquite is a little
different. Probably three years ago I
was given a split half of a log. To turn
it into workable pieces I used my bandsaw.
I started out by screwing the flattest side to a piece of MDF which will
act like a sled. Here you can see what that looks like. The straight edge of the MDF at the top of the photo will be held tight
up against the fence on the bandsaw to guide the log through to get a fairly
straight cut face.
Here you can see the result with the cut off scraps and
my good cut edge. It really came out
pretty good.
With a good flat face to work with I unscrewed the MDF
sled, relocated it to the just cut flat face and screwed it to that face. The straight edge of the MDF extends beyond
the log just like in the first cut. When held tight against the bandsaw fence I
made my second cut. This gave me a
90-degree square edge with two adjacent flat faces. I could now use that 90-degree edge and the
flat faces to square off two more sides giving me a piece of wood pretty close
to square with four flat faces. From
there its just a matter of setting the fence and slabbing off pieces. The photo below shows both the slabs and
what’s left of my original log.
After running the band sawn slabs through the thickness
sander, I had smooth flat pieces that I could layout the mallet parts on. This is the layout for the outside
faces. I paid attention to the grain and
worked around the cracks in the wood.
The handle will be set in a tapered mortise. However, rather than glue up a big block of
wood for the mallet head and then try to cut a tapered mortise in it I decided
to take a little different approach. I
put the head together in four pieces.
There are the two outer faces and then two pieces that make up
the center layer. It’s pretty easy to
use the chop saw to cut a 2-degree angle on the center pieces to give me my
tapered mortise. Here is what one face
and the two center pieces look like ready to get glued up.
Here is the first glue-up for the head clamped in
place. I decided to do it in steps as
trying to get all four pieces clamped up in good alignment sure sounded like a
recipe for disaster. The left glue-up is
the mesquite and the right is the white oak.
The black ring on the left side of the white oak piece is where I left
an iron “C” clamp on while the glue set up.
Its black because the iron reacts with the glue and the tannins in the
oak leaving a black stain. That’s not a
problem here as that edge will get trimmed but if it were a finished face I
would need to put a non-reactive barrier between the clamp and the oak.
Once the glue cures I can glue and clamp the second face
in place.
After the glue cured overnight I removed the clamps and
squared up the blank using the table and chop saw. Next is to mark the 2-degree cut I will make
on the left end. The slight angle on the
face will help counteract the fact that when striking something ones arm is not
at a 90-degree angle to the item being struck.
I also laid out the curved end on the right side. I use the band saw to rough the curve
out. The photo below shows the cutting
in progress. After I cut two of the
faces I needed to tape one of the cutoffs back on so I could see where to make
the last two cuts.
Here you can see the rough cut rounded end and the
2-degree cut on the other. The next step
is to smooth out the rounded end. To
accomplish that I used the disk sander, rasps, files, the power hand sander and
finished with some hand sanding.
Next Up – Making the Handles
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