A Joiner's Mallet

With sometime on my hands waiting on parts for my next project I thought I would take a second to reflect on my last project the joiner's mallet, this was built out of a need to replace the one I had recently broke. It was constructed from pine scraps I had laying around the shop at the time, and looking back at this I realize now how bad of a choice it was to constructed a mallet from pine, and to someone who does joinery the issues of this should have been fore seen but this was one of those lessons I learned first hand. With the new mallet I wanted to improve on the short comings of the old one. First there was the choice of stock, with this having been the down fall of the previous mallet I decided to use oak this time a hard, dense wood that will certainly take whatever abuse I could put it through, but not too heavy as to allow for a soft tap to a chisel when needed. My next thought was how could I maximize the impact blow of the mallet, to achieve this I looked at the natural pendulum motion of the mallet when swinging it and quickly realized, if the face of the mallet was at an angle I would achieve a better impact then I would with a square faced mallet and this would also allow for a more comfortable and accurate situation when using it. Next was the handle and for this I used walnut with really only two things in mind, first I wanted the handle to be a little longer then the previous version to allow for a better leverage when swinging, and second was comfort it had to feel comfortable in my hand. With all of my thoughts worked out I was in the shop cutting, shaping and carving then finally finishing it all off with a coat of oil. Since completing the new mallet I have used it several times and I'm very happy with the feel of it, very comfortable to use and more then capable of delivering a hard accurate blow or providing a gentle tap where needed. This was a great project producing a joiner's mallet that I will certainly be using for a long time to come.



To check out this project video click this link
http://youtu.be/v7KGiVU-38Y

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