With Mallets Towards None

Dan Smith is my blacksmith friend.  Everybody, by the way, needs a blacksmith friend.  Shortly before I got out of the Coast Guard and moved away from the Tidewater region, Dan asked me if I could make a mallet for him.  He was having a problem when be was doing fancy work, he would sometimes have to do some minor bending after he had put detail in a piece, and his steel hammer would damage his work, so commissioned me to make him a wooden mallet.  The mallet could be ugly, because it was going to be used to beat on red hot metal and is essentially sacrificial.

Well, the saga of the past year has prevented me from completing the mallet, until this past weekend.  I am not sure exactly what design he wanted, so I put these together for him, and we'll see if they work.  The heads are Southern Yellow Pine, and the handles are red oak, morticed in about 3/4 of the way into the head, then pinned with dowels.

We'll see how they work.  He should get them in next week.  If there are any blacksmiths out there who can advise me about wooden mallets for fancy work, by all means....

While I was making these mallets, my two youngest daughters, Emry (10) and Tave (4) were in the shop with me.  Emry is making a small box right now and was trying to clean up her joinery with a chisel and I realized that she needs a mallet, too.  (her box build will be featured in a future post).

Additionally, Tave has been carrying around a short piece of poplar dowel I used to practice threading wood saying it was her "hammer" and that with it she can fix anything.  So, she needed a mallet, too.

I had a chunk of white oak I had glued up about two years ago with the intent of making it into a bandsaw box, but quickly discovered that it would make a better mallet than box.  After squaring up the block of oak, I cut it into two mallet heads, chopped a mortice into each one, then glued in a red oak handle.  I shaped the handles with a spokeshave, then pegged the handle in with dowels.  My 14 year old, Quinn, wanted to burn their names into the mallets, and this is the final result:

Some happy girls with some pretty snappy mallets.  Emry has been using hers to work on her box, and Tave has been 'fixing' everything by tapping on them.  Luckily, she can't swing too hard yet.