Firewood Maul

[knots]

A few years ago I needed a wooden maul to straighten a red hot twist . Not having one I improvised by walking over to my firewood storage area and selecting a likely piece that could be held and used as a maul without modification. The makeshift fire wood maul did it's job and the hot iron was straightened. After the forging session I decided to retrieve my carpenters ax and refine the handle to make it more comfortable to use. That first maul is still hanging around my shop but has been joined by a succession of others. It is shown in the thumbnail below.




I started making these useful tools using only a carpenters ax . That worked well. A good sharp ax, used alone, can produce a functional or even beautifully subtile and refined shapes. As shown above even crude club-like shapes function well for the straightening of hot steel. Since that first maul I have made a number of these mauls for my self and friends. However, in addition to my ax, I now use my band saw to rough out the mauls and planes and a draw knife to finish them. Example below.




Other examples below are promising pieces of fire wood band sawed and waiting for shaping and finishing.



Although some species of wood are better than others for maul making I generally make them from whatever is currently available since they are easily made and therefore expendable.

[Frosty]

If they work they're successful tools. Do you finish them?

I pick up wooden baseball bats at garage sales to make mallets from.

Frosty The Lucky.

[knots]

If they work they're successful tools. Do you finish them?

I pick up wooden baseball bats at garage sales to make mallets from.

Frosty The Lucky.

Scortched cross hatch of burned lines are about the only finish I have ever applied. Old base ball bats would would be a superior source of hardwood. However the firewood concept just shows that you do not need any special materials to make something useful.

So you use the mallets . What do you use for handles ? Before I started whacking out firewood mauls I did have an old croquete mallet that I cut down to a manageable size. That one was not ideal. However the rule is that anything that works is good . For this application nothing is particularly long lived.

[Frosty]

Our hardwoods aren't much good for mallets, birch, alder and cottonwood predominate. I use the bat handle and shape it to fit a drilled hole in the head. Dirt simple not needing much if any wood working talent.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Bentiron1946]

I used to have a baseball bat that I used for preliminary sinking of large sheets of copper and steel (cold) and it worked very good for that. I'd cut the handle of the bat off and then shape the large end of the bat like a large cross pien, then double hole in it and rasp it out rectangular in shape, drive in a wood wedge and have a wonderful sinking hammer. Ash hammer was big enough to do some fast sinking of metal at a cost of about a $1 for the bat and an hours time. Cottonwood make nice dishing stumps.

[MOblacksmith0530]

I like soft woods for wooden hammer faces. I buy the clamp style hammers for a couple of bucks each and remove the plastic or leather (they stink when burning) go out and find a nice soft wood like sycamore or cottonwood and turn out blanks and put them in as needed. I used to use hardwod but it splits too easily a soft crossgrained wood like sycamore cottonwood birch works best for me.

[John McPherson]

This photo is from another forum, showing that minimal wood working and welding abilities are required to make a usable tool.

However, if you want to sell your tools to the public, image is important.

[trinculo]

A good timber framer friend of mine drives all his high dollar chisels with dogwood mallets that he turns. He says they last for years.

[knots]

This photo is from another forum, showing that minimal wood working and welding abilities are required to make a usable tool.

However, if you want to sell your tools to the public, image is important.

I like the idea of baseball mallets and of refitting a commercial clamp style mallets with a wooden strike faces. I especially like the idea of making a wooden faced mallet held by a wood handled iron framed mallet clamp. However I don't think that the one pictured would be a model I would choose to make. It seems to me that the protruding flanges would present a hazard if used with hand held tools. I think a safer model would be to extend the metal saddle beyond the handle connection to allow through bolting. This modification would eliminate the flanges and the potential hazard that they present.

The pictured tool does however illustrate that effective tools can be fabricated using simple welding and metal forming skills. Thanks for showing us this tool.