Carver's Mallet Pair

This project was posted in 2018 on another site so there may be some discontinuity.

This is my entry for the 2018 Lumberjock's Mallet Swap.

My inspiration was this picture:

Unfortunately, there was no source information for the picture so I don't know who made it or who to credit.

I really liked the way the different woods converged to create a continuity and I liked the overall shape of the design. What I REALLY liked though was the carved embellishment. Since I couldn't carve that if there was a gun to my head, especially in a wood hard enough for a mallet head, I decided to go a different way.

Instead of attempting to carve into the head, I decided to do a Celtic Knot lamination. I started with Greenheart for the head. This wood is incredibly hard but also very strong and not brittle. Initially I was just going to use some Hard Maple and laminate the knot into the Greenheart blank. But then I thought I would like to see a little more contrast. So, I used some Greenheart and made the lamination in a piece of Hard Maple. Then I cut the Greenheart blank and turned a tenon onto both pieces, drilled out the Maple with the knot lamination and glued it all up.

And don't get me wrong. I'm writing this as if I just glued some stuff up and turned it and shipped it. I think I glued up a total of 6 laminations for the knots and turned 4 complete mallets. One turned out terribly and went to the trash and one was ugly as sin but functional so it resides in my shop as a nice user

So after getting the head blank glued up, I turned it to shape and drilled it out for the handle tenon. I didn't think a through tenon would look good for this design so instead I used a blind wedged tenon that JayT brought to my attention early on in the swap. It's a rock solid joint that required no glue and I can't imagine it ever loosening. The handle was made from a spalted Maple blank with a piece of Greenheart joined to the end as a "pommel".

After I finally got a good one that I was happy with, I was contemplating what to make to go with it. So the idea of a second one with the woods inverted would make a really nice yin/yang pair of whackers. This idea filled me with dread because I really hate doing all the glue-ups :-( But, nevertheless, I knew that was what I wanted so the second mallet with the Maple head and Greenheart handle was born!

The Greenheart is so dense compared to the Maple that I thought the difference was sufficient to give a nice difference in the weights of the two mallets to make it a more useful pair. They ended up weighing in at 8 oz and 11 oz. Not as much difference as I was hoping for but enough to give them a different feel in the hand and make them ideally suited to different tasks.

Comments and questions welcomed as always. Thanks for looking!