Make two solid woodworking mallets out of a rolling pin.

so one of my favorite things about woodworking is that I just get to hit stuff I'm not going to make some snappy joke or something that's it I love to hit things since we're talking about woodworking I bet you'd expect me to talk about this the old faithful carpenter's hammer got a claw and strengthened face and I use these but really only for household stuff like repairs I don't think I've ever used one for woodworking here are all the things that I use more often large ball peen hammer small tack hammer deadblow hammer rubber mallet double sided rubber mallet to pound hand sledge small ball peen hammer rawhide auto body hammer now these are all really good hammers and at some point you should probably pick up most of them the ball peen hammer and the tack hammer get the most use in my shop but even though all of these are good they aren't my favorite even though I own lots of hammers I do almost all of my woodworking with old-fashioned wooden mallets now most of the time you're using mallets to hit chisels and these days a lot of chisels come with plastic handles and you really can beat on them all day long with a hammer without damaging them but you might not want to the thing that's great about wooden mallets especially when you're using them with wooden handle chisels is that as you strike the chiseled handle the mallet compresses a little bit and then it expands and delivers that energy into the chisel handle which also compresses and expands that way you have an extremely efficient transference of force and very little spring back that you have to absorb in your elbow even though mallets like this seem old-fashioned they're actually very efficient and ergonomic out of the three I like this one the best it's a traditional joiners mallet and I made it myself it wasn't very difficult and all it cost me was a few wood scraps but it wasn't exactly a beginner's project either if you're just starting out with hand tools this might be biting off a little more than you can chew instead it would be really great to have one of these Carver's mallets or one of these traditional round mallets the traditional carvers mallet is good when you want to tap things gently or hit things from different angles and the traditional round mallet is also really useful large and heavy enough for when you really need to hit something harder now of course you can make both of these mallets really quickly using a lathe but of course if you're watching this channel you probably don't have a lathe and that's okay you don't need one if you have a couple of hours you can make both of these mallets in your own shop for about a buck all you need is a rolling pin I got this one at the thrift shop and I think it cost me 50 cents rolling pins are actually perfect for this the size is good they're relatively heavy and they're made out of maple which is the exact same sort of wood that you would make a mallet out of anyway closed grains dense and won't split aside from your rolling pin you'll need a couple different sizes of dowel oak or maple is best but you can really use whatever you have sitting around you're also going to need some round dowel shaped piece of metal this is the stem from a large bolt that I cut the head off but you could use anything you have sitting around as long as it's iron or steel a piece of rebar would even work fine and you'll need some scraps of hard wood to fill in holes and make a handle out of I've got exactly 12 inches of rolling pin so I'm going to use about six inches from my large turned mallet and maybe two or three inches for the head of my carving mallet cutting large round pieces like this rolling pin can be difficult dangerous power saws want to spin them or grab them out of your hand and throw them across the room so I'm using my miter box it makes a nice clean cut and I've still got all ten fingers now for the handle I've taken a piece of oak it's about 12 inches long an inch and a half live and roughly an inch thick this piece isn't square so I'm just putting it in the vise and planing off the rough stop I stop every couple of minutes and check the end to make sure it looks like it's getting square and then after I've got it pretty close by I I stop and check it with a little Sheena's square everything is square and level so now I'm done and I can check it for width I'm going to use a 3/4 inch Forstner bit to make the mortise in the head of my mallet so I need the handle to be exactly 3/4 of an inch it's over right now so I planed it down a little bit more and check it again now it's just about perfect so I'm going to stop and try to make the handle a little bit more comfortable I want it to be tapered so the first thing I'm going to do is Mark the bottom 4 inches 8 and width then I mark the width of the mallet which is two and a half inches I don't want that part to be tapered so I leave it square I connect the bottom of where the head is going to sit to the one and an eighth line I made in the bottom and that gives me my taper I just plane that off in the vise but you could use a band saw or a table saw with a tapering jig if you have one there are no brownie points for doing this the hard way once the tapered it's starting to feel like a mallet but it still got really uncomfortable edges and now's a good time to take care of those I've got my block plane set up for a relatively fine cut and a chance for the edges changing the angle of the plane as I go so it's not just 90 degrees but it's actually rounded and more comfortable now it's better but it could still use more work so I make a mark about halfway down the handle section I just eyeball it then put the handle into the vise and work up from either direction towards that mark with a spokeshave what I'm aiming for here is to have a scalloped thick in the middle and narrows either edge that's going to make it easy for my hand to grab it exactly the right spot there's no science to this just keep working on it until it feels right work up towards that middle mark from each section and you might have to flip it around a few times because you'll get confused I just did now I've made a center mark on my mallet and I'm going to draw a center line on my mallet head it's pretty easy to do freehand just line it up with the edge of the head and draw a line you'll probably get it right on the first shot then you also want the center point so measure in from either end to get that then you can line up the center point that you made on your mallet and now the mortise is laid out you just need to know where the ends are because you're going to be drilling out most of the mortise so now I've got my Forstner bit set up so the edge is where the edge of the mortise is going to be and the point of the bit is on that center line I just rip now I can flip on the drill and start doing the work now I'm using a drill press here but you can obviously do this hand drill or even embrace some bit that's what you've got one of the downsides to the drill press is you might forget to clear the chips like I did and get the bit jammed in there so I took it out and cleared the chips and now I'm going to continue my mortise you'll notice that I'm only going a little bit each time now and clearing the chips I hate getting the bit stuck because makes me look like a giant idiot on camera nobody likes that very much once I get to the end I line up the Forstner bit really carefully with the other edge and drill down slowly making sure to clear the chips again like I've been doing now the great thing about forcing the bits is that once you've done drilling the main holes you can go back and drill out the waste because they don't need to be centered on whatever they're drilling now I've got most of the waste for the mortise taken out I'm just going to take a chisel put it almost on the sidelines not quite and tap it down with mouth I'm keeping it exactly perpendicular and then levering forward to clear the waste and I'm just going to move forward through the mortise that way clearing out the waste with my chisel straight up and down and perpendicular now I've got a hold it's pretty good although one of the Forstner bits drifted over a little bit on one side we'll just make that the bottom mallet and nobody will see it the handle won't go in exactly and so now is a good time to do a little bit of pairing I'm just gently working out the waste on either side I do it from one end of the mallet and then I flip it around and do it from the other end so it won't break out now I try to fit in the mallet handle and if the limb go in as far as I want it looking at it I see there's a gap on either side but it's very tight on the ends so I need to take a little bit more material off there off-camera I just pair that off really quickly and what I'm left with is a mortise that fits much better when the handle is only sticking out about an inch you can cap it down until it's seated only a half an inch or maybe three quarters of an inch are left so now we've got something that looks and feels an awful lot like a genuine woodworking mallet there's only two problems first it's too late and second well it has giant holes in either end but don't worry we're going to fix both those problems first thing we're going to do is deal with the weight grab your piece of metal both rebar whatever and cut a couple of slugs about three-quarters of an inch long you can use a hacksaw or the cutoff wheel on an angle grinder me I own a metal cutting bandsaw so I'm going to go use that hold on a second now I've got two steel slugs and there's 3/4 of an inch long by about five eighths of an inch in diameter I've also taken the head of my mallet over the drill press and drilled either end out to 5/8 of an inch that means my slugs fit right in snug but not too tight they're pretty easy to get in and out putting these in is going to solve the weight problem and give me the heft I need to really whack on things now the other thing I need to do is fix the holes in the end and that's what my piece of scrap dowel is for this dowel is about 3/4 of an inch thick so I'm going to head over to the drill press and drill out the ends of the mallet to three-quarters of an inch and then cut to one-inch sections off this piece of dowel now if you either don't have good hardwood dowel or you're running out of drill bits and the sizes that you need no problem go ahead and take a square piece of stock put it over this open and trace around it and then just chisel out a small square recess like our mortise for the top it doesn't need to be perfect you just need to be able to get your piece of hardwood scrap in there and then we're going to glue everything into place here I'm going to do the Assembly of the mallet it's pretty simple I'm using five-minute epoxy which I stir up on an old piece of sandpaper once the epoxy is well mixed I'm going to add a little bit of sawdust that I collected from underneath my bandsaw the dust is going to thicken the epoxy it's going to make it blend in better and it's going to allows us to use less glue and fill the gaps more efficiently I also quickly grabbed a drift which I'm going to use to knock my metal slugs in they might be a little tough to get into the holes once the glue is on and it is so I've got to pound them in a little bit to get them see it then I cover the pieces of hardwood dowel with glue and tap those in with the carbs mallet then I take the glue and spread it around to fill all the gaps I also do that around the handle so that none of the gaps in the mortise show wants to try so here's my completed mouth to get it to this stage I cut off the plugs that were sticking off of the faces I used a fine-toothed back saw but you can use any sharp saw you have sitting around or a bandsaw that will work great too after the sides were cut flush I put it in the vise and use the block plan to further flatten and true up the faces of the mallet so they'd strike really evenly that I used a combination of sandpaper and a card scraper to get rid of all the old dried epoxy and make sure all the surfaces were smooth and clean to the touch the mallet I just made is actually better than the vintage turns mallet in one key respect because we gave this one a rectangular handle as soon as you grab it automatically registers in the hand perpendicular to the direction of force it's always facing the way that you want it to go this mallet because it's got a round turn handle if you grab it without looking you can't tell which way it's facing and it's easy to pick it up and try to hit a chisel only to find that you have it on a diagonal or some sort of awkward angle also while you're working it can slowly drift away to an angle that's not optimal while you're hitting this mallet can do that so strangely it's actually better than the traditional and once you've finished making a mallet like this it's going to be really easy to use the same materials and techniques to make a Carver's mouth like one of these I started making the Carver's mallet by taking the piece rolling pin that I had leftover and cutting about an inch off of it that makes the chunk that I have left really similar to one of the mallets that I actually bought this little piece that I have here is going to be important for a later step so don't throw it away over at the drill press I've got the rolling pin clamped in with a couple pieces of cardboard just Pat it and keep it from getting dented I'm drilling out three-quarters of an inch to about an inch deep and that's going to let me put the handle it then I flip it around and drill out 5/8 about two inches deep that's going to let me get my metal slug in this mallet only has four pieces and I've got them laid out here I've got the main part of the mallet the bottom part which I made out of that tiny piece of rolling pin the dowel which is going to be the handle and my metal slug this slug is about two inches long because I've got the space and I want this mallet to be heavy and deliver plenty of power every time I hit a chisel with it I'm doing the same thing just mixing in a little bit of sawdust with the epoxy when I've got enough and it's as thick as I want and knock off the excess then I roll the pieces in the epoxy and stick them in I use my finger to spread the glue around at a paper towel to get rid of the excess now when I'm putting in the dowel I stick it in the glue and then I twist it into the head of the mallet that distributes the glue more evenly and make sure I'm not going to have a dry spot I do the same thing with this bottom piece here and then the whole thing is wiped down with the paper towel and it's ready to be clamped and I can leave it that way usually for about 24 hours once mallet comes out of clamps you need to shape it a little bit these sharp edges are no good against the hand and they make the tool uncomfortable so you can clamp it in the vise or just use C clamps against workbench whatever works and then you can shape it with a file or a rasp or even a piece of sandpaper glued to a stick here I'm using a Nicholson super shear the finest wood shaping device ever invented I hope to do a video about them in the future once that's done I work on this bottom part here stop at the lower part of the handle it's really important that this feels good because it's going to touch your hand pretty much the entire time you're using the tool the only thing left to do now is test the mallets here's the round mallet and you can see that I'm using it to take off large pieces of wood you can use it aggressively or gently and it stands up to whatever treatment you need here's the Carver's mallet and it's good for working things more gently and hitting things from different angles and with a little bit more finesse now I don't actually know anything about carving so I'm pretty much just faking it here but you can see that it's not very difficult for me to take little chips of wood out and make recesses of any size or shape that I need so now we've made Carver's mallet and chisel mallet and it's only cost us a dollar or two and materials and a few hours of shop time now these tools might not look like much but they don't require any compromises from the user either they're solid enough and heavy enough to do real work and they should last for years the longer you do wood work the more likely it is that you're either going to find vintage ones that you can buy at a good price or acquire enough skills to make your own in the meantime these two mallets are going to take care of everything you really need in the workshop on top of the other tools we've already bought we still haven't even spent $40 so we have a lot of money left to use to fill our toolbox for only a hundred bucks catch up with me next week and we'll talk more about cheap tools and ways to make them thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 54,082

Rating: 4.9016895 out of 5

Keywords: tool, tools, wood, woodworking, mallet, mallets, carver, cheap, hand tools, make, maker

Id: Xes8AzTijBI

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2017