Heat Treated Maul?

[Jeff Robinson]

Hi there. I'm fairly new to the world of hand tools and traditional style woodworking. As a farmer/homesteader I've always been one to make most things that I've needed, just always did it with power tools and screws/nails in a modern construction type of way. I was recently given copies of Eric Sloan's "A reverence for wood" and "A Museum of Early American Tools". Those along with the Fox Fire Series have recaptured my fascination with the outdoors and true woodcraft.

Anyway - In one of them (I can't remember which one now) it mentions using a heat treated maul for riving shingles with a froe. Can anyone offer an explanation as to how/why one would go about heat treating a maul? Obviously a green maul is likely to peel it's layers quickly and you would want it to be dry, but wouldn't heat treating it reduce it's hardness and weight so much as to not make it worth it? Wouldn't it be ideal to make the maul and then let it air dry for as long as possible before using it? Any thoughts?

[bridger berdel]

Charring wood (or nearly so) is one method of hardening it. Could be something like that.

[Roger Nair]

I don't have a traditional answer but air drying should precede heat treatment because if free water is interior and heat drives of moisture on the outside, then the outer wood shrinks while the inner wood remains the same dimension thus setting up grain collapse, case hardening and severe checks. Seems to me that flame hardening should take place after the wood reaches moisture equilibrium. I my own practice I carved mallets from green dogwood main stem and went straight to work.

[Jim Koepke]

I my own practice I carved mallets from green dogwood main stem and went straight to work.

Same here, mine are usually made of firewood. When they get ratty, they can be tossed in the stove.

jtk

[Warren Mickley]

Fifty years ago, Eric Sloane was inspiring people with his drawings and tales of folklore. However a lot of things he wrote about were not well researched. As an example, he made a big deal about the lower man on a pit saw wearing a large hat to avoid sawdust. Had Sloane ever done pit sawing he would have known sawdust was not a problem.

I doubt he actually learned about hardening a maul either from historic texts or from the experience of people who actually did this kind of work. A maul for making shingles was something that wore out and needed to be replaced. It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time one it. In 1970 I knew a guy who made a barn roof of riven shingles. He used old bowling pins as mauls. The pins were undoubtedly well dried, but he still went through an awful lot of pins.

[Jeff Robinson]

Thanks for the thoughts everyone. The information in those books is obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, but sometimes it seems there are hidden gems in them and finding them is the hard part. I guess "heat treating" a maul is as strange of an idea as I thought it was though.

[Tom M King]

The first wooden shingles I ever made were by following those directions in the Foxfire books back in the '70's. After finding various wooden shingles that had served their purpose for over a hundred years, and seeing that the surface weathers away, rather than simply rotting, I started sawing them instead. I'll make them either way, but at the same price per hour regardless of method, no one has been a purist enough to get me to split them, so far. I don't know what the difference in speed factor is, but my two helpers, and I, can go from a stack of Cypress boards to a pickup load of shingles in about an hour and a half, by sawing them out of boards. Check out the Cypress shingle page on my website, if you like.

The hardest part of riving them, around here, is finding suitable logs to split them out of. The same White Oak logs that would be ideal for shingles get sold for the highest dollar for other uses like veneer. Anyone who spends much time making a maul for riving shingles, is not going to make many.

I met Roy Underhill the last year he was in school as I just happened to be walking past his house. He was teaching a class in his backyard to a group making shave horses. I walked up, and asked what they were going to do with so many shave horses. Story shortened, he invited me in his house, and was surprised that I knew what all the tools were. His house looked a lot like his TV set does today. He asked me if I was an "Eric Sloane freak?". I did have all the Sloane books.

[Lon Crosby]

It is called torrefied wood - wood heated in a low oxygen environment driving off moisture and low energy volatiles and setting lignin, creating a product that has increased density and hardness. Easy to do in world where wood fires were everywhere. So call it a nugget!