Mallet

For my mallet, because I am a very cheap person, I decided to glue together some scrap plywood I found in the shop.

This glued plywood was clearly uneven, so I tried sanding and cutting it to make the edges smoother. This didn’t go great either.

After realizing that this wasn’t going to accomplish a ton for me, I just decided to go ahead and start turning.

After rounding the plywood, I needed to figure out a shape: I’d previously been impressed by the hourglass-shaped one in Ben’s collection, so I figured I’d try my hand at that. This was… difficult.

After an exceptionally long period of getting to this shape, I added some fine lines and was done rounding the head. I then drilled a hole for the handle and marked other holes for the pin using the handy-dandy 15 degree rotation thingy on the spindle.

I realized that my mallet center was so small that it’d be easiest just to drill a pinhole on the drill press, so from there I went on to making my handle. I had some leftover wood from a previous project (I believe it was pine?) that I went ahead and used for that.

However, two problems quickly became apparent.

1. My handle hole was smaller than I would be able to turn to on the ends of the spindle.
2. Having such a small handle end was, uh, risky.

I discovered the difficulty of (2) when my first attempt at a handle split on the spindle.

This called for some out-of-the-box thinking. I decided to leave the area attached to the drive center as-is and turn the area past it thin enough to fit, using a ruler to get the rough length I needed then cutting to fit. This worked a lot better.

At this point, I was pretty much done with the wood lathe, and the area showed it.

In cleanup, I ended up being probably the first person to clean the vacuum in a year — with the help of Amitabh and Morgan, we cleaned the entire thing down to the filter.

You hate to see it.

After this, using the drill press I made a small hole through the mallet.

I sanded off the drive center marks, picked up a tiiiiny dowel from home depot, cut it to fit the head, and then glued the head and handle together with the pin, which brings us to now.

My plan for tomorrow is to use the dremel to sand off the ends of the pin. I’d initially hoped to treat it with butcher block oil for home use, but after consulting with Ben that seems like an incredibly bad idea so I may just wax it for decorative/weapon purposes.