Paul Sellers Mallet

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Paul Sellers Mallet

I recently received a copy of Paul Sellers’ book on hand tools. In it, he describes the mallet he designed and gives some tips on reproducing it. Here is a link to a bit of information on his website: https://paulsellers.com/2013/04/heres-my-mallet/.

Here’s my version.

Laying out the mallet head on a hunk of Osage orange. Osage orange is an ideal wood for mallet heads due to its extremely tight, dense grain. It is also one of the hardest woods found in the US.

Chopping away with an axe. The axe is an extremely valuable tool for woodworking.

With a rough mallet head, I started to 4 square the head. For the uninitiated, this means making sure all four sides of the block are square with one another. I mostly used a stanley #4 plane for this job.

Having marked the centers of top, bottom, and one face, I began boring a hole through from bottom to top.

Cleaning out the hole with a chisel leaves a nice through mortise. This picture also shows the rounding of the top of the head.

A rough result of fitting the oak handle.

The head all smoothed up and some scallops taken out with a spokeshave.

I took some scallops out of the handle too, mostly just by feel until it felt good in my hand.

After much smoothing with a scraper and sandpaper, I used boiled linseed oil over the course of a few days to finish it.

Dayne loves hacking things, in both a computer sense and a wielding an axe sense.

Why put your plant on the ground like some sort of animal when you can spend hours making a wooden plant stand?

A gift for my mother in law, a simple coat rack made from old walnut.

What’s cooler than a mirror that shows you handy information before starting your day? Adding voice controls so that you can update your calendar, play Spotify playlists, and so much more.

“He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.…