A brace of mallets

I went to a car boot sale the other day, and I bought myself a lovely handbag. Goatgirl was a little disconcerted when she found out – she thought that perhaps I was trying to tell her something.

In actual fact, the reason I bought it is simple economics. Car boot sales are a great source of small pieces of leather for next to no outlay. This handbag only cost 50p, as did this belt, and both will come in very useful for future projects. In fact the belt, or part of it, was pressed into service immediately.

I have recently made two more mallets. The first is quite small, with a walnut head and an ash handle. I made it with intention of using it during assembly, to knock dovetails together for instance, so I wanted it to have a soft face so as not to mark the wood. Using the head as a template, I cut out a piece of the belt and glued it onto one of the faces with impact adhesive.

So much for the belt – the hand bag will likely be used to upgrade the linings of my vice chops, as well as my honing strop for edge tools.

The second mallet has a walnut handle and a beech head with walnut cheeks. I’m sure that it will work just fine but it is more decorative than anything else at the moment because I already have my large ash mallet for everyday use, as well as my old cracked apple one. Maybe I’ll try to sell it – who knows?

Anyway, that’ll be it for mallets for a while. I’m in the middle of another project at the moment that I’ll probably blog about soon.