Thor's Hammer

Ok, so its not actually a hammer, Its a mallet. A wooden mallet works good for tapping wooden parts together, such as mortise and tenon joints, dovetails, etc. Also work good when used with chisels. They don't leave a bunch of hammer marks on the materials. This mallet is the first tool I've ever made by hand.

I started with some scraps of leftover 2 x 4. Since lumber tends to be pine or spruce, its a pretty soft wood, so I wouldn't say its the best to use, but its what I had. Cutting the head was straight forward. Just a 5" section of lumber cut from the board. The handle was cut down from a 12" length of board to about 7". Then I took the shortened piece and split it in half. So I had a handle that was 7" x 1-3/4". The next step is the fun part. I had to make a mortise and tenon joint. The mortise was cut in the head of the mallet using a 1/2" drill bit and a chisel to square the edges and smooth everything out. The mortise for a mallet normally go's all the way through, but I decided to cut mine to about 2" deep. The next step was to make the tenon in the handle. I started by transferring marks from the mortise to the handle so I could accurately trim it down. It takes several cuts to make a tenon. I used a Japanese style handsaw that cuts only on the backstroke. It takes both cross cuts and rip cuts to trim it to size. After doing a test fit, I applied carpenters glue to the mortise and tapped the handle back in. After it dried I could start on the finish work.

Example of Mortise and Tenon joint

At this point I had a working mallet, but not a very nice one. So the next step was to sand down all the edges of the head until they were smooth and rounded off. Then I used a knife to carve the handle into a comfortable shape and finished off by sanding it as well. So there you have it. How to make a mallet out of a scrap of wood.