Mallets

It is so nice to be finally actually working with wood.  Our first real project was to turn mallets.  We use these wooden mallets much as one would normally think to use a hammer.  The advantage to them, though, is that they don't mar your work when you hit it with them.  We could just turn a mallet from a solid piece of wood, which is how most are made.  However, the quality of these mallets is not as good as it could be.  If you hit a piece of wood enough you can start to delaminate the growth rings.  This is how vaneers are made.  The wood pulls apart in sheets that each represent one year of growth.  However, we don't want our mallets to peel apart.  So, we start with a single piece of hard maple (which is a very hard wood, and thus good for making the mallet head).  We cut it into 3 pieces that are the length we want our mallet head to be and glue them together.

My future mallet head.

Next, we cut it into thirds again (It is important to cut with the grain.  I cut mine the wrong direction on my first attempt and had to start over).  We take the middle of those pieces and cut it in half.  Then use our hand plane to make sure the pieces and our walnut handle are flat and square.  After a couple of glue ups, we get a club like rough mallet ready to be turned.

Ready to head to the lathe.

It still looks like a club.

The entire outside face of our mallets look like the face of a quarter-sawn board.

The purpose of doing all this is to try to produce quarter-sawn pieces to use.  When a piece of wood is quarter-sawn the growth rings run perpendicular to the face of the board.  By getting all of our pieces to be quarter-sawn we are essentially making all the growth rings run from the center of the mallet to the outside of it.  This way the growth rings can't delaminate.

One of the other guys in the program also cut his first mallet head wrong.  On the one I messed up, the end grain would have been facing out.  This would have made a very hard mallet and would have helped with the delamination problem, but would have been nearly impossible to turn.  What the other guy did was got to the point where he had to cut the middle of the three pieces in half and cut it across the length instead of the width.  This would make the mallet head half the size it was supposed to be.  Wanting to not just waste wood, he and I decided to divide up his improperly cut mallet head and each make mini mallets.  This ended up being a great idea, because I was able to use the mini mallet as a test run in order to figure out how I wanted my full sized one to look.  Here are the pre and post turning pictures.

Almost there...

Beautiful new mallets.