Thread: More malletry

It's Christmas time (if it wasn't obvious already)... so keeping up with the mallet theme, this year all my loved ones will get a, yes that's right, a mallet. A thumping great carpenters mallet to be exact.


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They are made from reclaimed Ironbark (heads) and Victorian Ash (handles). They are 330 mm long (300 mm to the head) and the heads are 120 x 75 x 65mm. They weight 730g (which is what the much larger Beech mallets weigh).

I made two types of striking faces - flat face with hand tools and an angled face with a mitre saw and belt sander (I was running out time). The angle as laid out was 7 degrees but the final angle is 8 degrees (there are formulas online requiring arm lengths, blood types and peanut butter preferences - about 800mm, B+, and crunchy - but I saw plans with 5 and 7 degrees as common face angles, so settled on 7 - like who would notice the difference in use).

The head is attached by a tapered mortice and corresponding angle on the handle that creates a wedge (no external wedges or glue are used or needed). The head is made from four laminated pieces of Ironbark, with the inner two pieces having the mortice (cut by hand with saw, chisel and router plane). All four pieces had jointed faces and were glued with Titebond 2 (I have found that past failures were because of imperfect faces creating uneven glue surfaces). The handle was shaped with a flat bottomed spokeshave, card scraper and sanded through the grits to 400. The mallet was finished with two coats of boiled linseed oil and a generous coat of shop-made hard paste wax.

Unfortunately I am not sponsored by a laser burning device company, CNC router company, or any company for that matter, so there are no names, logos, biblical verse, images of pets or loved ones.

This is a great hand tools only project for someone getting into woodwork and gives you a great tool at the end that will be endlessly useful in the shop for whacking, tapping or otherwise being belligerent to a tool, cabinet or anything else.