I had a little fun in the shop this morning. Soon I'll be firing up some chairs to build, and right now I am kind of jigging up and tooling up for this big project. Besides the jigs my son and I have been working on, today I got in the shop and made one complete mallet, and I have a couple more in the wings that need to be made as well.
Before I took these images I had already made my layout lines and cut the mallet handle slots on my table saw. I simply set my table saw t-slot miter to 4 degrees and cut the slots in from one side then I set it at 4 degrees the other way and cut the other slot in the other side, then I hogged it out with several passes over the table saw blade. My 12" blades have 1/4" wide teeth so it didn't take long to hog the slots out. I laid out 3 mallets and gang sawed them.
I cleaned up the slots with shoulder plane, the slots were heavily kerfed so I used the shoulder plane to knock the kerfs down, not all the way, but just enough to clean it up.
I cut my lay out lines to produce the mallet blank halves. The key angle here is 5 degrees on the face. This allows your mallet to be used flush on a bench without your knuckles hitting the bench top but at the same time to have a sweet spot at the arc of your swing or tapping.
Blanks ready to be glued up
The handles are just dry fit into the slots. To get a great fit I had to sneak up on the handle widths, as not all handle slots in each mallet were the same as the next, because I cut these on the table saw without any jigs, just eyeballing lines is all. So each mallet was a tad different. I had to plane each handle to fit each slot right. I'll have a better assembly process next time, I plan on making many of these and pass them out as gifts and possibly sell them as well.
A dry fit looking at the top of the mallet, the slot is tapered, so the bottom is tight and snug, the top is flared out leaving room for the wedges to secure the mallet. When I do these again I'll cut the slots so there is not much of a flare out at the top, it's really not needed. I think a 2 degree slot flare would suffice next time instead of the 4 degree.
Lots of glue in around the handle, and on the wedges, I wanted the entire slot filled with either wood or glue, securing it for life. I tapped the outer wedges in just a tad, and I drove home the two center wedges pretty hard. Keep in mind, if you make a mallet, the wedges must be tapped in perpendicular to the grain to avoid splitting the wood.
Cleaned up the glue a tad
I used my bow arc to make the arc on the top of the mallet. Was an arc needed? No, but the mallet looks better with some shape to it.
The arc
All the edges of the mallet were chamfered with my block plane and the handle of the mallet of was shaped using my draw knife and a card scraper.
The finished mallet at the right, and my two roughs waiting in the wings on the left. I put a very heavy coat of Watco Danish Oil on and wiped off.
Here is a fun picture showing the hand tools I used to help make this mallet, it took a combination of my table saw to make the slots, the shoulder plane to clean up the slots, the miter saw to cut the blanks at 5 degrees, and my hand tools to shape and make it interesting.
It's hard to see, but the chamfers I put into the handle and the edges of the head, are less than perfect, but that's alright, it's a mallet! The most difficult part was shaping the handle with my draw knife, ash is so brittle and grainy, it shapes horribly with hand tools, so I had to follow up my draw knifed handle with a card scraper.
I'll be finishing the other two tomorrow. The main reason I built this mallet was for my chairs, I can't use a regular steel hammer without leaving marks, and a rubber mallet bounces too much. I already gave this mallet a test drive and I also used it on some chisels, I love it.
I did not use any plans, I just read up on the required angle of the face of the mallet, and made my mallet thicker than the average. Most mallets I looked at were in the 2 3/4" thickness range, I made mine at 3 1/4", and I am glad I did, it has a nice big face.
Thanks for following along!