Making weird stuff: Making a carving mallet from scratch from Box and Hawthorn woods

Here's a fine mallet on one of my work benches. It's a weighty 2kg and densely solid - a real joy to work with.

Here, I am using it while building a piece of furniture, but before this, I also built the mallet itself from scratch from logs of box and hawthorn. Making things yourself, using tools you made yourself is a special pleasure :)

Logs

Box logs from trees killed by Asian box moth - 2023 (seasoned for about a year)
Hawthorn from a felled tree found in a lane in Wales - 2021 (seasoned for about 3 years)

It's solid...

And weighty...

And ergonomic - it is a joy to handle, as well as being super hard and heavy.

Build - Summer 2024

Here are box logs. These are treasures. most box plants you find are neatly trimmed bushes. These are huge boles for a box - 9"-11" in diameter!!

You might be able to count the rings. I haven't but some decades it looks like, given how slow box grows. This wood is dense.

Preparing to chop off a hunk of wood. I am using a good old scavenged pallet as a rest. The log sits stable between the pallet slats.

Like this...

After a bit of chainsawing...

About 35-50 years old, maybe.

Next it was screwing on the lathe end plate. I'm not showing it, but I did drill pilot holes for these screws...

You can immediately see that the cross-section is far from circular . It was going to need a lot of roughing down before a uniform diameter was achieved.

The first rough is done by hand with a power planer. The centre of mass was was so eccentric I didn't risk trying this on the lathe. Trying to spin such an off-centre mass was risking violent vibrations that might be dangerous. Box is very dense.

After a rough trim, the stock was ready to lathe. This wood was still a bit green, even after a year or so of seasoning - this had consequences later as you will see further down.

Next was to get it on the lathe for rounding down with this roughing gouge. As it happens, I also made this chisel, blade, handle and all, but that is another post...

Making turning chisels from scratch (Making Weird Stuff June 2017)

After not too long the bobbly block was quite close to cylindrical. Box is very hard and evenly grained, so it is easy to turn. The wood was still a bit green too, so this means less flying dust.

The yellow bit is just where it is freshly cut. The lighter sandy colour is where it has been cut and has dried more.

This job is good for getting sawdusted.

I was a bit concerned that this block was too green and when it dried out, it would split (clue - I was right - it did).

I had hoped that I could get away with this by slowing the seasoning by containing the stock in a plastic bag to slow down the moisture loss. (clue - I didn't get away with this)

Here, you can see the raw block in the bag. It weighed just over 2 Kg (about 4.4 pounds)

BUT, things don't always go according to plan...

I was thinking this was game over here, but decided that was too defeatist, and so I decided to augment the split mallet head with epoxy resin. Using epoxy and wood together is something that artist turners sometimes do when making bowls and it is also used when making river tables

NB - the wood fibres (cellulose) are much stronger than the "glue" (lignin) that binds them. When the wood dries, the lignin parts and the fibres remain. I left these in situ as they would reinforce the resin later (just like carbon fibres reinforce Kevlar resin or glass fibres reinforce glass reinforced plastic) .

Mallet salvage...

To fix the gaping rent in the mallet head, I first had to leave it for ages to wait until the wood stabilised to a constant moisture content, so the split wouldn't grow later.

Then, to fill the split, I sealed the ends with plasticine. This forms a good seal against liquid resin, and is convenient to remove later when it is set.

The stock was also stabilised to stop it rolling, with more plasticine under it...

And strapped to the base with good ole gaffer tape to keep it stable when the resin was added later.

I was originally going to use the resin in its raw clear form, but decided to add some colour. This is Veridian green acrylic artists paint. I didn't need much.

Stir it in...

Then transfer to a clean container and give a final mix. I do this as the resin itself is in two separate liquids and sometimes the first one in gets stuck to the side of the original mixing container.

Then I just poured it into the crack...

It was quite hard to get the wood level, so the resin "waterline" is very slightly lower at one end.

Three days later...

This is the stock after the green resin had set proper hard and the plasticine and gaffer tape had been removed.

Prepping for re-lathing

I popped the lathe plate back on. First lining it up centrally...

And marking through the holes to drill new pilot holes (the old ones had moved due to the drying and splitting)

Screwed back on...

And back on the lathe. This shows the start of cutting it back to get the wood and resin to the same diameter.

You can see where the resin was not evenly levelled...

After some more turning...

From the side

Another low area that needed the wood cutting back to remove...

Here you can see the fibres now acting as reinforcement inside the resin.

Handle

The mallet head is from super hard, and satisfyingly weightily-dense box. The handle was hawthorn.

This I also hewed from a log. Happily, because this had been seasoning gently in the shed for about 3 years, it didn't crack later...

Hawthorn is slow growing like box and is quite fine grained too as a result (although nowhere near as hard). Large logs of hawthorn are also not very common. This one was found in a lane in Wales.

Hawthorn is quite irregular in how it grows, so you get a lost of wastage to get a cylindrical block out of its squiggley logs

It also has markedly darker heartwood - a pleasingly rich, milky-coffee-brown...

Which yields a lovely palamino effect when you cut a regular shape from its irregular form.

One side...

The other side...

Log and stock side by side...

The hawthorn handle needed to be long enough to form a handle and a cylindrical tenon to fit into a matching cylindrical mortice in the box head...

Turning the handle. The handle itself is on the left. The tenon on the right...

Still quite rough...

I then drilled out a matching cylindrical mortice to receive the tenon of the handle...

I drilled this out using a flat bladed bit, with a handheld drill...

The ruler is about an inch wide. This shows that the hole is quite big. I wanted the handle tenon to be strong and so it needed some girth. It is also 5 inches deep

Next, fitting the handle using more epoxy. I didn't stain this mix...

In place. The colour of the oozing dribbles is not dye. It is the colour of wet box - a lovely yellow. If you are old enough to remember wooden school rulers, these were yellow, because they too were made from box.

Close up...

Three more days later...

Back on the lathe to finish turning the connected parts into one pure solid of rotation. You need to do this, because it is almost impossible to align the mortice and tenon perfectly centrally.

By re-doing on the lathe, you correct this.

I seem to have been doing this at night...

The now radially symmetrical mallet after cutting back the excess resin, but before final shaping.

The resin face. Note I had lined up the heartwood streak in the hawthorn handle to the resin streak in the box head.

The opposite face. It's pale as t has just been sanded.

A lot of subtle shaping and fine smoothing later...

This shows the final mallet shape. I turned it so the handle merged seamlessly into the head, so it would be smooth on the hand when adjusting one's grip on the tool. This was sanded down in stages

with sandpapers from 80 grit to 120 grit, to 320, to 600, then finally 1200 grit
then fine wirewool - this is the best for curves as it moulds to them, unlike sandpaper
then finally using emery paste on leather to get the glass-like finish

It is worth noting that the way I checked if the smoothing was satisfying was not by looking at it.

I did this by holding the mallet and letting my fingers feel for any visually imperceptible pits or blemishes. Using a tool is all about the sense of touch, so this is the only true way to do this.

This led to a remarkably smooth end result.