There I was, thumping away at a mortise in the stool top. Whap whap WHAP, hey, something just got funny. Remember how I hinted that the Ash chisel handle might bite it? Well, it turns out that the chisel made a pre-emptive strike (notice the perpetrator lurking in the background here):
A totally predictable failure pattern, I suppose. I did the only natural thing here and glued it back together:
I don’t know how long this repair is going to last.[*] In theory, it should be okay if I manage to strike in the center of the mallet, but then again, the ultimate reason that this happened was because I didn’t hit the chisel handle in the center.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. Maybe one or more of these will help in the future:
- A bigger mallet for bigger jobs like this. [note: see Joel's comment below on why this may not be the greatest of ideas]
- Strike in the center.
- Make the mallet out of wood with an interlocked grain.
- Not hit the chisel so hard.
[Edit: July 24, 2011, about a year and three months later. However, the new break was totally different.]
The lesson is that this is the way things are supposed to happen. mallets should be softer than chisels because as you saw it’s a lot easier to repair or replace a mallet than fit a new handle.
Joel, you’re definitely right on here. I’ve done both, and I would have to say that I’d rather repair the mallet ten times than replace a pigsticker handle once!
How well does Elm wood work for mallets? It certainly has fibers running across the grain. Splitting it green for firewood is almost impossible.
Hi John, I actually don’t know about elm, but I’d been wondering about it. It’s hard to split, but for some reason, the list in Hoadley’s book says that its shear strength is significantly less than beech and a couple of other harder woods that mallets are traditionally made from. This may not matter, though.
Another wood to think about is hornbeam, which is pretty nasty when it comes to having interlocked grain. I do know that there are mallets made out of it, and it’s also used for chisel handles and plane soles. The only thing I’d worry about with it is that, because it’s so tough, it would have a tendency to demolish handles.