If you look at recent videos of Paul Sellers working he now uses a plastic-faced hammer most of the time, where presumably in the past he used nothing but a wooden mallet like every other carpenter 40-50 years ago. And here's Richard Maguire (The English Woodworker) having a bit of a rant about mallets.sebinho":3l16wuv9 said:
One of the first inklings you might get that using a steel hammer isn't going to kill your wooden chisel handles as is often said is that one of the traditional styles of carving mallet has a head made from lignum vitae. Sure it's wood, but you might as well be hitting the ash handle with a ball-pein hammer for all the difference it would make :lol:
Yes this is one of those things where you could do with the tool to help make the tool! For just the one mortise though you could do it mostly by paring if you had to. Although it'll be slow you'll get there in the end.sebinho":3l16wuv9 said:
But if you decided you need some percussion then you can just hit the end of the chisel handle with a hefty branch or a suitable length of wood. I can't think of who it is but there's at least one carver out there whose 'mallet' is just a roughly rounded length of hardwood, I think it's either osage orangewood or hornbeam.
You can avoid all of this though and just laminate the mallet head up, many modern mallets use a built-up construction rather than having a head formed from a single block of wood.
