Thread: Re-Starting with some Wooden Mallets

I Started wood turning when I was a young thing when my mum bought a small lathe when she started woodworking in her 50s. I still have the remainders but it had about a 5" swing with a short aluminium bed and a tiny sewing machine motor. I did some tool handles which you can see in my blog here http://hancockshardwarehouse.blogspo...y-chisels.html but not much else. A few years ago I bought a new lathe but had not had much opportunity to use it but recently I have been getting into woodworking so I decided to take some fallen branches and do some experimenting with them.

My first endevour is a couple of wooden mallets.

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The wood is from a smallish mallee like tree of unidentified species. It is a dense resinous wood that dries extremely brittle. It is not a lot of fun to turn but is ideal for mallets due to it hardness. The larger one is about 600g and the smaller about 350g. I discovered that you have to be extremely careful turning smaller diameters since the larger one broke away as I was turning the end of the handle so I had to put the chuck on and finish it with the head in the chuck. But it meant that I was stuck with the head profile. I would have liked to taper it towards the handle. You can see some of the pieces I cut off the blank at the top of the photo.

I finished it by first applying a coat of shellac. I then rubbed in a couple of coats of wiping varnish using 800G wet 'n dry. I finally applied a coat of wax. I used the varnish to add durability to the wood, not that I think it needs it.

I am sort of pleased with the smaller one although I could have profiled the handle a bit more. The larger mallet was suffering from a largish split and I could have done more to profile the head and the handle is a trifle thick I think. I filled the split with epoxy and scraped it smooth before applying the finish.

I am thinking of trying again with a larger piece of green wood and cut a blank from one half of the log which should make it less prone to splitting. Also if I seal it it should not dry so fast and shrink to a slight oval, which would be fine I think. It should be easier to turn green as well, but I did make a dibber for the little woman from the same wood but green and that was also quite difficult to turn.

I would welcome any help and ideas, always willing to learn .