Neanderthal Mallet
Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI
>I have a couple nice pieces of wood and decided I will eventually make a mallet. The "Official Neanderthal Mallet" has interested me since the first time I saw it, especially since all the dimensions were in metric and my shop runs in inches and feet. I have made some mallets before, several turned carving mallets and a joiners mallet I designed based on the size of wood I had at hand.
This time I wanted to draw the neanderthal mallet in AutoCad, figuring it would give me some practice, and also give me the ability to get a good idea of the scale. Drawn full size, this is one big mallet. The head is 4-3/4" long and I scaled the missing measurement for the height and came up with 3". The handle was 12-1/2" long.
The handle length really looked out of scale to me. I ended up toning it down to 11" long. The other thing that bothers me a little is the size of the handle going through the head; it appears to not leave a lot of wood between the mortise (for the handle) and the working end of the head, and I'm concerned the short grain will break or crack from taking a beating, but the scale of the handle to the head looks good to me. I didn't dimension this one, but full size it is 11" long with the 4-3/4" long head on it. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, whether you would change any of the details; once the design meets aproval I'll finish the drawing in AutoCad, and can then scale the size to meet whatever purpose I have in mind or scale it to fit a certain peice of wood. I'll share pics of the finished mallet also, fair warning to those of you already bored to tears ;)
