Mallet

Also called: carver's mallet, joiner's mallet

A mallet is a striking tool with a broad head, usually wooden, swung by hand to drive a chisel. A mallet, rather than any other striking implement, is the tool for this job, and a joiner's mallet is meant to be used only for driving chisel handles, not for any other task.

Head and handle

Hasluck (1897) put it simply: 'The mallet used by wood workers is made of beech, and the handle of ash.' Sizes vary with the task. A small mallet suits precise, controlled work, while heavier chopping calls for a carving mallet turned from a single piece of solid wood. A mallet with a soft, non-marring face can also be used to knock apart an overly tight joint without leaving a mark on the wood.

Which chisels take a mallet

Not every chisel is meant to be struck. A firmer chisel, a general-purpose chisel suited to both paring and light mortising work, cutting a rectangular socket into wood, is handled differently depending on the job: Audels (1923) explained that it is 'driven by hand pressure in paring, and by blows from a mallet in mortising.' Hasluck (1897), setting out his own classification of chisels, held that 'mortising chisels are the only ones on which a mallet is intended to be used, and the butt end of the handle is protected with a heavy iron ferrule,' a metal ring or cap fitted over the handle's end to stop it splitting. A chisel built for framing and heavy mortising work is driven into the timber by mallet blows alone, and other heavy mortising chisels are made thick between face and back, ground with a bevel, the angled face at the cutting edge, of around twenty-five degrees, purely to withstand that battering; the shoulder where the blade meets its tang, the spike that fits into the handle, keeps the tang from splitting the handle under the blows.

Chopping and paring

Short bench chisels suit chopping, the technique of removing wood fibre through firm mallet blows, and chisels ground for chopping carry a steeper bevel, roughly thirty degrees, so the blows do not crack the edge. For light waste, such as a small lock mortise, hand pressure alone can drive the chisel without a mallet. Cutting a hinge housing, the recess that lets a hinge sit flush with the wood, follows the same pattern at a larger scale: the ends are chopped out with a chisel held vertical and struck by mallet, and the housing is brought to its finished depth by paring bevel-down with a mallet-struck chisel. Once dovetail pins, the narrow angled projections of a dovetail joint, are sawn, the waste between them is likewise removed with a mallet-driven chisel. In chair construction, a narrow mortising chisel for the back-slat joint can be driven either by mallet blows or by hand pressure on the shoulder.

Limits and bad habits

A mallet does not always finish the job. In building a post-and-rung chair by hand, if mallet blows fail to seat a tenon fully home, a pipe clamp, a clamp made from a length of plumber's pipe, can press it the rest of the way; if the blows instead drive the tenon in too far, the same clamp set outside the posts can pull it back. One alternative technique is said to cut down on both mallet use and the noise the work produces, though how it does so is not described. Standard practice calls for a mallet to drive the chisel; Audels (1923) warned that careless workers instead grab whatever is at hand, even a corrugated-head lathing hatchet not meant for the job. In carving, by contrast, the mallet is expected to stay constantly in the carver's hand, since its continuous use lets the work be finished in roughly half the time it would otherwise take.