After making a very beginners mallet out of oak and then a small detailers mallet out of cherry burl and ash I came back to Rex Kruger’s video on what he called a more advanced mallet. After watching the video I decided to support him by purchasing his plans and set out to push my skills a little more by making this more advanced mallet.
Since this was just my rendition of his very well captured and documented design I don’t think I need to document too much of my process. I will say that I decided to challenge myself by making the head out of padauk, an exotic hardwood, because I liked it’s unique color and it had properties that seemed to be appropriate for a mallet head such as a similar density and elastic modulus to oak while being 60% harder and 20% higher crush strength. I made the handle out of ash per Rex’s recommendation in his plans.
The wood choice did make the whole project a little more challenging than it would have been had I stuck with the domestic hardwoods he recommended for both parts. For example the padauk was a little more splintery, especially when chiseling the tapered mortise in the center. Also I did run into issues planing it by hand and was dealing with tear-out, not surprising for this hardwood. I found the book Getting Started with Handplanes to be helpful in explaining the issue I was having and how to try and resolve it. I did buy a new (used) blade to go on my Stanley handplane and sharpened it as recommended and did largely, although not completely, get away from the tear-out I was seeing.Â
The carving process of the handle was all new to me. And if I’m being honest it took two attempts. The first attempt ended up being made wrong (I screwed up the features just under the head of the mallet) and so I got to make it twice. The second attempt came out much better. Lots of rasping and sanding.
Finally I’ll note that the process of gluing padauk to anything is a noteworthy process. While some people say they glue it like any other wood I also found lots of people claiming that the oils in the wood could cause the glue bond to be weak. To resolve this it is recommended to thoroughly wipe down all the surfaces of the padauk that will be glued with acetone to remove all the oils. I did this, with several rags coming away bright orange, until the color largely had subsided.Â
I finished off the assembled mallet with a few coats of boiled linseed oil. While this did darken the padauk noticeably my hope is that it significantly slows down the rate at which it turns brown which is the natural color for it to oxidize to. Only time will tell.
While I haven’t had too many opportunities to use my new mallet so far I really like it! It has a good balance to it and feels solid. Making it also did push my skills even further, forced me to really lean into challenging hand planing, and start to learn how to work with more exotic woods and wood selection!
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