Wood Balls, Mallet & Overlapping Circles - #5 Finishing the Mallets

I am now ready to cut the wedges that will lock the handle in the head, I hope forever.  The wedges are made from a contrasting wood.  Hard maple in the case of the mesquite mallet and black walnut for the white oak one.  Here in the left image below I have tilted the bandsaw table 2-degrees to match the angle of the mortise and am ready to cut a couple of wedges.  The right side shows the two cut maple wedges.  I also cut a walnut set for the oak mallet.

Here is a photo taken while I was fitting the wedges.  They need to go almost all the way to the bottom of the slots but not quite.  I need to keep some room at the bottom so I can drive them in when ready.  This photo also shows where I have rounded over all the corners on the head.

Next is to put some blue tape around the top of the mortise (helps in cleanup of glue squeeze-out) add glue to the slots and drive the wedges in.  They spread the tenon and when the glue cures the handle is permanently locked in place.  The photo shows that done and all the glue cleaned off.

After an overnight cure of the glue I use Japanese fine tooth pull saw to cut the excess tenon and wedges off.  Here the blue tape also helps protect the top of the mallet from scratches made by the saw.  I must have gotten a good glue joint as they came off all in one piece.

After applying three coats of Danish Oil Finish I had a these completed mallets.  Or so I thought.  They looked good and had the right amount of heft but the handles were too slick.  They did just not have the right amount of grip.  I thought of three different possibilities to fix the problem.

1. Knurl the handles.  I have done that albeit a long time ago to some steel handles.  The problem here is those handles were round and not oval.  For the life of me I could not figure out how to make it happen on an oval much less one that has a curved taper. 
2. Checker the handles like what is used on a gunstock.  I gave this quite a bit of thought but kept running into a similar problem in getting a continuous pattern around a tapered surface.  The only way I could think of doing it was to do two half patterns with a gap between them.  Doable but not quite what I was after.
3. Dimpling the surface in a random pattern seemed to meet all the requirements. 

With dimpling as a potential solution my only problem was that I had never done it.  From experience I know how hard making a “random” pattern can be.  I also was not looking forward to putting what seemed like probably a thousand dimple in one by one.  For help I asked some wood and metal working friends for help.  I belong to the Borderline Turners which is a local group of wood turners and they gave me some good advice.  They suggested using a pneumatic scaler.  A scaler, needle scaler or needle-gun is a tool used to remove rust, mill scale, and old paint from metal surfaces. It consists of the body of the tool which has a pneumatic piston and about a dozen hardened steel rods the piston hammers against.  They in turn pound on whatever you put them up against.  Below is a photo of the tool with the steel rods coming out the right side. 

The ends of the rods are square cut like what is shown below on the top left.  To get dimples I needed to take the tool apart and regrind the ends so they are rounded like the bottom left.  Once I had all of them reground the same I could reassemble the tool ending up with the group of scaling needles shown on the right.

After doing some testing on scraps I developed a technique applying medium tool pressure and a medium flow of air at about 90 PSI.  The ON/OFF trigger is graduated to control the amount of air through the tool which controls the speed of the impacts.  However, as the pattern was really random I needed a way to fill it in where I made the transition from dimples to smooth handle.  To do that I ground the end of a 16-penny construction nail to match the size and shape of the scaling needles.  The photo below shows the finished dimpler and a closeup of the business end.

To help control where the dimples ended I wrapped the handle with a layer of poster board and several layers of tape.  Here it is setting on a carpet scrap ready to be dimpled.

This is what the handle looked like a couple minutes later with its nearly completed random dimpled surface. 

Here I am adding them in one at a time filling the ends in with random size and spaced dimples.  I did do a little more cleaning up on the transition after I removed the tape.

Last steps are lightly rubbing the surface with steel wool to get rid of any sharp edges or splinters then giving the handles another coat of Danish Oil Finish.  Once the finish had cured I tried the mallet out and the dimples provide just enough tooth to allow me to get a secure, comfortable grip.

After having used the two mallets a little I find that I like the oval handle on the mesquite one a lot better than the white oak’s rectangular one.  Even with the rounded edges the oval handle just feels better in my hand.  If nothing else I can use the white oak mallet to crack nuts.

Next Up – Overlapping Circles Starting & The First Side