Making a Joiner’s Mallet
Making a wooden mallet is a traditional apprentice piece in which you can practice your mortice and tenons as well as shaping skills.
Making a wooden mallet is a traditional apprentice piece in which you can practice your mortice and tenons as well as shaping skills.
To complete the mallet there is some shaping and refining to do. Paul shows the various techniques that can be used to do the shaping. This includes putting some scollops into the handle and rounding certain aspects of the head. This completes the making of your joiners mallet, ready for woodworking.
With the stock prepped it’s time to accurately layout the mortice hole to ensure a tight fit for handle. Make sure you’re auger bits are sharp as the next step is boring two holes to help align the mortice before chiselling it out and doing the initial fit of the handle.
In this episode, Paul discusses the features that make a good mallet, including choice of wood. The stock is then cut to shape using a few different methods including splitting with an axe, cutting the tapers with the bow saw and handsaw and creating reference faces with the smoothing plane.