Making a Carving Mallet From Raw Boxwood and Hawthorn Logs

My favourite mallet. Made from scratch from foraged and home-seasoned raw logs.

It's a weighty 2kg and densely solid - a real joy to use as a tool.

The head is a very dense hunk of yellowy box - lovely colour, great feel and dependably strong enough to whack chisels etc without concern that it might break

The handle is an interesting palamino patterned piece of hawthorn, which is probably even harder to source from a timber supplier than box is.

What's of use from this Instructable...

1. If you've even wondered if you can build a tool from actual tree logs, not just buy some timber?
2. Yes you can!
3. Also, sometimes seasoning can go a bit wrong - But in this case I also used epoxy resin to fill in unexpected cracking from seasoning too fast, and the result was surprisingly effective and very satisfying

Logs

1. Box logs from trees killed by Asian box moth - 2023 (seasoned for about a year)
2. Hawthorn from a felled tree found in a lane in Wales - 2021 (seasoned for about 3 years)

Tools

1. mid-range hobby bench lathe
2. hand-made turning chisels
3. various grit grades of sandpaper
4. steel wool

Other

1. Clear epoxy resin (two part moulding grade)
2. Cold-pressed rapeseed oil

The box logs here are quite rare and I was lucky to come across these. These are treasures. most box plants you find are neatly trimmed bushes. These are huge boles (for a box tree). Roughly 9"-11" in diameter!!

It was a bit sad that they became available because of an infestation of box tree moth that killed the trees, but it was also nice to resurrect them as useful things from the wood. This mallet isn't the only thing I have made from them.

The box was a mature size for this smallish tree. The tree it came from had been about 15 foot high and I believe was somewhere between 30 and maybe 50 years old.

The hawthorn was from a felled hedge tree, found down a lane in rural Wales. This was probably 20-30 years old. Again, quite a rare find. If you see these things, grab them straight away, before someone chops them up for firewood.

I love this tool. it is really heavy (about 2kg or 4 pounds and 6ounces) and sits in the hand very nicely. Both box and hawthorn take a lovely super smooth finish, so it is smooooth in the hand with no roughness. This allows me to manouver it easily when changing positions.

I like the way I can let it slide into different positons when changing grips. I added a slight flange on the handle end to stop it slipping out of the hand completely when doing this as it does glide about very easily.

The approach here was simply to get the fairly uneven logs into something like a octagonal cross-section, close enough to a circle, without trying to get it it too perfect. It is best to leave it quite rough and use the lather to figure out ho wfar off a cylinder it is. I used a bench saw and a (powered) hand planer for this.

Once I had screwed a face plate on, I roughted out the basic slightly conical shape of the head with a coarse shaping gouge.

I actually make this chisel too, a while back in 2017. The chisel is slightly different to a traditional roughing gouge in that it has a protuding convex edge form (as seen from above) as well as a concave blade (as seen end-on). This will allow me more flexibility to build different shapes when getting a piece of stock wood to a roughed-out shape.

The blade was forged from a rock-breaking bit from a pneumatic drill, the handle is walnut from logs scrounged off my dad and the ferrule is a section of steel tubing sawn off the frame of a folding bike that I had scrapped.

If you want to see how you can also make chisels from found materials, you can see the write up on my blog here

https://makingweirdstuff.blogspot.com/2017/06/chisel-making.html

The perils of not waiting long enough when seasoning...

I had had the box in my shed for something like 9 months which is not really long enough for such a chunky log. I really should have cut some pieces from the log and left them to season as smaller forms.

But I didn't.

Anyway, despite putting the roughly turned in a plastic bag to slow down moisture loss, it still dried out quickly and split.

I didn't want to give up on it though. I decided to augment the split mallet head with epoxy resin. Using epoxy and wood together is something that artist turners sometimes do when making bowls and it is also used when making river tables. There are several fine examples of people usign epoxy with wood here on Instructables. (some are awesomely more advanced than my use of it here)

NB - in timber (aka lumber in US) the wood fibres (cellulose) are much stronger than the "glue" (lignin) that binds them. When the wood dries, the lignin parts and the fibres remain. I left these in situ as they would reinforce the resin later (just like carbon fibres reinforce Kevlar resin or glass fibres reinforce glass reinforced plastic). Essentially I am filling in the missing lignin with epoxy here.

To fix the gaping rent in the mallet head, I first had to leave it for ages to wait until the wood stabilised to a constant moisture content, so the split wouldn't grow later.

Then, to fill the split, I sealed the ends with plasticine. This forms a good seal against liquid resin, and is convenient to remove later when it is set.

The stock was also stabilised to stop it rolling, with more plasticine under it and strapped to the base with good ole gaffer tape to keep it stable when the resin was added later.

I added some colour. This is Veridian green acrylic artists paint. I didn't need much. I just mixed it in with the resin mix.

I then just filled the crack and left it for about three days, so the resin was completely set.

Once the resin was set, I popped the lathe plate back on. First, I re-aligned it centrally. To do this, I remarked the screw holes. The original holes ones had moved due to the drying and splitting, so I couldn't rely on those.

Resin is easy to turn. It is easier than the surrounding wood as it doesn't have the fibres creating a grain.

The handle was hawthorn. This I also hewed from a log.

Hawthorn is slow growing like box and is quite fine grained too as a result (although nowhere near as dense or as hard). Large logs of hawthorn are also not very common. This one was found in a lane in Wales.

Happily, because this log had been seasoning gently in the shed for about 3 years, it didn't crack later...

Hawthorn is quite irregular in how it grows, so you get a lost of wastage to get a cylindrical block out of its squiggley logs. The heartwood is a pleasingly rich, milky-coffee-brown and quite noticeably different from the sap wood. Beacuse of this, the handle has some interesting patterning. The final result was a lovely palamino effect when you cut a regular shape from its irregular form.

The hawthorn handle needed to be long enough to form a handle and a cylindrical tenon to fit into a matching cylindrical mortice in the box head.

In the photo with the lathe, the handle itself is on the left. The tenon on the right...

Once I had a tenon on the handle, I then drilled out a matching cylindrical mortice in the mallet head to receive it and join the head to the handle.

I drilled this out using a flat bladed bit, with a handheld drill.

In the photo above the ruler is about an inch wide. This shows that the hole is quite big. I wanted the handle tenon to be strong and so it needed some girth. It is also 5 inches deep

Wait three more days...

The epoxy resin is probably Ok to use after 24 hours, but I left it three days so it was completely cured.

I then got the mallet and attached handle back on the lathe to finish turning the connected parts into one pure true solid of rotation. You need to do this, to get it centre-balanced again.

This is because it is almost impossible to align the mortice and tenon perfectly centrally when attaching and gluing . You could use a lathe to cut the mortice hole, but I don't have a tail-chuck on my lathe, so it wasn't practical (nor safe) to attempt that .

Note when gluing, I had lined up the heartwood streak in the hawthorn handle to the resin streak in the box head.

Sanding and final smoothing

This shows the final mallet shape. I turned it so the handle merged seamlessly into the head, so it would be smooth on the hand when adjusting one's grip on the tool. This was sanded down in stages

1. with sandpapers from 80 grit to 120 grit, to 320, to 600, then finally 1200 grit
2. then fine wirewool - this is the best for curves as it moulds to them, unlike sandpaper
3. then finally using emery paste on leather to get the glass-like finish

It is worth noting that the way I checked if the smoothing was satisfying, was not by looking at it.

I did this by holding the mallet and letting my fingers feel for any visually imperceptible pits or blemishes. Using a tool is all about the sense of touch, so this is the only true way to do this.

This led to a remarkably smooth end result.

After all the smoothing, I wanted to give it a final oiled finish to help protect it from drying out. I used cold pressed rapeseed oil (from the larder). This has a nice natural yellow hue that works well with box.

I also steeped some rosemary in this to give it some scent. This was quite strong at the start, but it does fade over time.

You can see the difference in colour in the photos showing the oil applied to half of ther mallet. The oil brings out the colour of the two wood and adds a little extra colour which unites the colour across the two woods nicely.

Conclusion

If you have a lathe, it is easy to make a mallet. The trickiest part is finding the wood. But as you can see, it is definitely possible to do this from scratch from logs, if you come across them.

Just maybe be a bit more patient when seasoning them, and definitely cut blanks first before seasoning.