How to make a wooden mallet

In the previous posts we saw how to cut a wooden tenon with the jigsaw table and how to make a mortise with the drill press. So in this post we are going to see how to use the two pieces in which I cut the tenon and the mortise to make a wooden mallet. I just have to join them together and then shape the wood mallet.

You will notice that I use a small drum sander for drill press. Now I have a homemade sanding drum that I made myself for the drill press.

Draw the shape on the wooden handle of the mallet.

I’m going to start by drawing a simple shape on the wooden handle of the mallet. I just want to narrow this piece of wood a bit to make the wood mallet easier to hold. And incidentally to make the wood mallet look more nice.

And once I have the drawing I want, I cut the shape of the handle with my jigsaw table.

Sanding drum for sanding and retouching curves

The cuts in the curves are quite rough, but with the sanding drum it is very easy to make them look decent. And I’m also going to use the sanding drum attached to the drill press to sand the straight cuts in the handle.

So now I can use the router table, with a round over router bit with bearing, to round the corners of the handle …

Roundover router bit for rounding the corners of the wood mallet head

and to round the corners of the wood mallet head.

The router bit leaves a step in the wood mallet head

Actually, the roundover router bit that I use to round the corners of the head of the wooden mallet is larger in diameter than the roundover router bit that I used to round the corners of the handle. And at some time I should have changed the bearing, as it has one that is slightly smaller than it should be. The result is a small step in the wood that fortunately looks quite well.

Draw the shape of the handle on the wood mallet head

The bad thing is that with that step the handle does not fit well against the head of the wooden mallet, so I have to draw the shape of the handle where it meets the head of the wood mallet …

and I’m going to use a chisel to get rid a section of the step in the shape of that part of the handle. In addition, I also use the sanding drum on the drill press to sand and shape that part of the handle (as you can watch in the video). This way the transition from the handle to the head of the wooden mallet looks better.

Gluing the wooden tenon into the mortise

Now, after gluing the mortise and tenon joint, and waiting until the carpenter’s glue is completely dry,

Use the sanding drum to shape the mortise and tenon joint.

I am going to use the sanding drum to round the head of the wooden mallet. Thus the visible part of the tenon is also slightly rounded.

Retouching the wood male head on the router table

Now I just have to go back to the router table to round the corners in the area I just sanded with the sanding drum, and so give continuity to the small step I made.

And finally I can sand the whole wood mallet well and apply a couple of coats of varnish.

The result is a pretty nice wooden mallet that will serve as a decoration. And it might also be useful for cracking some walnuts and other nuts, but maybe not for hitting chisels in my small woodworking shop (well, in fact I have used it with some chisels and it works quite well 🙂 ).