Occasionally I need a whacker that is softer than a steel hammer and harder than a rubber mallet and, being the professional that I am, I just smack things with a two by four, or a smaller piece of wood if that's what's called for or just whatever's laying around, unless it's the dog.
having seen lots of mallets on the woodworking forums, I thought I'd do one, so I did. I just cannot seem to get away from lamination/segmentation so naturally I had to laminate it.
The intent was to have the handle have a cross section like a rectangle with semi-circle on each edge, pretty much like you get on claw hammers, but I got carried away on the lathe and turned it down round which looked fine although it did strip off almost all of the canary. BUT ... it really sucked in terms of giving me a solid grip so then I glued on some tapered wings along most of the length and wrapped/glued some soft cotton clothesline around it and got it back to the shape/grip I wanted. Looks crappy but feels great. Has just the grip I want.
The handle is a split piece of cocobolo with maple veneer on the inside and canary wood on the outside with two little chunks of paela to make the bulbous end. I didn't like the really sharp edges so I rounded them over with a router.
It has one coat of natural stain. The head is black locust sandwiched between pieces of chechem (that stuff is hard as a rock). Final weight is 29 oz so it's a fairly hefty sucker.
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