Making a cocktail muddler

Whilst invited to do cocktailing recently, I realised I not only have never owned one of those crushing thingies for grinding sugar into liquid, but I didn't even know what they're called. How hopeless is that?

Turns out they are called muddlers, defined by the OED as:

muddler, n.
2. An implement for crushing, blending, and mixing ingredients for a drink.

And so, I thought I had better rectify this and make one.

Here is the beauty. It's looking a tad like it's floating in space, like the symbolic bone projected into the air in the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It's oak, fashioned from a ripped-down section of an old fence post...



The starting point is an oak board. This was not bought as a plank. It was one of several 3/4" thick planks ripped from an old oak fence post. You can see the weathered cracks in it from the post and the circular saw blade cut-marks...


This was marked out roughly with a pencil...


Then the working piece sawn off the board


Next the the board was planed into a satisfyingly non-standard oval section. It's hard to see here, but I used a standard smoothing plane...


Then any roughness in the roughed-out oval section was smoothed using a selection of various files. This included a Surform plane, then a coarse metal file and finally a smooth metal file. Oak can take filing as it is so hard...


The business end of the muddler is a fairly crude crushing device - a sort of gripping pestle. To work up some "teeth" on the end, saw cuts were made to mark a grid pattern...


The saw cuts were then filed at an angle to produce a matrix of grooves, which created a grid of gripping teeth...


After all that, the muddler was sanded smooth using progressively finer emery paper (aka sandpaper). This was from about 150 grit to 240 to 400 grit...


And there you have it. Not shown here is the slight concave groove cut in the gripping end of the muddler shaft. This is to fit the thumb for comfort. The edges are subtly rounded too, to avoid discomfort when used in earnest...


Drinking something made with a tool you've made is a good feeling :)